>>20522468sadly, pictures of dead middle eastern children has been a constant presence in my life since we invaded iraq when i was in high school. it has driven me insane all my life. i can't understand how other people can just go about their daily lives like everything is normal. i used to go protest about it a lot, drove to Washington DC to drop off child-sized cardboard coffins at Lockheed and Halliburton HQ, etc
i feel like a big part of modern life is how well you are capable of adjusting to the implicit/sublimated brutality that everyone just takes for granted...eating meat grown in factory farms, wearing shoes and using phones made in sweatshops, watching wars on TV, enjoying luxury meals while homeless people OD outside or young black teenagers shoot each other a few streets over. or all the other forms of violence that are even more abstracted out- shitty food being pushed on people with heart disease, jobs being shipped overseas, fentanyl and meth being easier to obtain in most neighborhoods than fresh tomatoes and grassfed meat, the list goes on...
the state of this world drove me insane from a young age and i am still insane, and will continue to be insane about it until we successfully build some form of society that doesn't take brutality as a matter of course
a few months ago i got really into reading about the causes and aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis...reading about the bailouts and the naked greed and corruption in the derivatives markets, the subprime mortgage industry etc should be just as offensive as videos of a man getting fucked to death by a horse or beheaded by ISIS. much moreso...these things sentence tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of people to slow death and suffering at the stroke of a pen. Hank Paulson, Tim Geithner, fucking Ben Bernanke are way more vulgar and disgusting than Mr Hands or Tubgirl anyday
