Obvious take about the handsmaid's tale

I absolutely love that the handmaid's tale differs from other dystopia in that it's placed right at the beginning of it, rather than right at the end. The main character lived like us, thinks like us, she could be you. It adds to the horror and unsettling nature of the whole story. The "This could be you" effect extends beyong that though. It extends into the horror itself. The issues she talks about leading up to the events of the main story are our issues. Have been for a long time now worsened. We are her. I'm gonna write out a passage here I really liked from the book. 

cw for violence "Nothing changes instantaneously; in a gradually heating bathtub you'd be dead before you know it. There were stories in the newspapers, of course. Bodies in ditches or the woods. Bludgeoned or beaten to death. interfered with as they used to say. But those were other women, and the men who did such things were other men. None of them were the men we knew. The newspaper stories were like dreams to us, bad dreams dreamt by others. How awful, we would say, and they were. But they were awful without being believable. They were too melodramatic, they had a dimension that was not a dimension of our lives.

We were the people who were not in the papers. we lived in the blank white spaces at the edges of the print. It gave us more freedom. We lived in the gap between stories"

I think this passage directly calls out the reader, as well as many others. It talks about the desensitization to violence and the direct harm it can have on our society. The way the degree of separation given by privilege makes you susceptible to blindness to the threats around you. It's fantastic. It could be you, because it is you. You are in the before, reading a story you yourself are removed from, saying how awful.

Now this is a really obvious take, but I think that it is important. I've seen this book come up a lot in "I can't believe that insert book is coming true." The handsmaid's tale has always been true, it has always been a cautionary tale we did not listen to. Because the stories of our lives don't feel real.