drugs, when used consistently, constantly, destructively, are all anesthesia from pain. The Mexican drug cartels crave money, but they make that money from the way Yankees across the border crave numbness. They sell unfeeling. We buy it. We spend tens of billions of dollars a year doing so, and by some estimates about a third to a half of that money goes back to Mexico.
Rebecca Solnit: Apologies to Mexico - Guernica / A Magazine of Art & Politics - 0 views
-
-
We want not to feel what’s happening to us, and then we do stuff that makes worse things happen–to us and others. We pay for it, too, in a million ways, from outright drug-overdose deaths (which now exceed traffic fatalities, and of which the United States has the highest rate of any nation except tiny Iceland, amounting to more than thirty-seven thousand deaths here in 2009 alone) to the violence of drug-dealing on the street, the violence of people on some of those drugs, and the violence inflicted on children who are neglected, abandoned, and abused because of them–and that’s just for starters. The stuff people do for money when they’re desperate for drugs generates more violence and more crazy greed
-
Then there’s our futile “war on drugs” that has created so much pain of its own.
- ...8 more annotations...
Among the Disrupted - NYTimes.com - 0 views
-
Writers hover between a decent poverty and an indecent one; they are expected to render the fruits of their labors for little and even for nothing, and all the miracles of electronic dissemination somehow do not suffice for compensation, either of the fiscal or the spiritual kind.
-
Journalistic institutions slowly transform themselves into silent sweatshops in which words cannot wait for thoughts, and first responses are promoted into best responses, and patience is a professional liability.
-
the discussion of culture is being steadily absorbed into the discussion of business. There are “metrics” for phenomena that cannot be metrically measured. Numerical values are assigned to things that cannot be captured by numbers. Economic concepts go rampaging through noneconomic realms:
- ...10 more annotations...
1 - 3 of 3
Showing 20▼ items per page