Back to the Future??

Parable of the Sower is set 30 years after it was first written in the 1990s, and sometime in those thirty years something happened in the US that changed society from what we know today to a society where the economy has fallen apart and people have to arm themselves to protect against looting and violence. This is strange, but the one parallel that I can draw to this is Back to the Future part 2. 

*spoilers, sorry* 

Because of what Marty and Biff do in the 1950s, once Marty returns to his home 30 years later in the '80s, he finds his society has completely fallen apart after Biff became the most powerful person in the country. Because of Biff's mismanagement, Hill Valley is full of violence and crime. The only way to make money is through Biff's casino, and Marty's old neighborhood is boarded up, his school is burned down, and his principal carries an automatic weapon. 

This is a lot like what we see in Sower - I have no deep thoughts on this, because we aren't far into the book yet so we don't know exactly what happened to Lauren's town and country, but I thought that it was a fun parallel. Maybe Butler expected some sort of powerful Biff-like character to take power and run the country to the ground? Or maybe some cataclysmic event ground the economy to a stop and chaos descended on the country? I found an article that says that Butler wrote her dystopian books as a warning about what could happen "if this goes on." What "this" is, though, is for now unclear.