Joe Paterniti

“Not a single high-level CEO has even been charged in connection with the financial collapse, much less been convicted and sent to prison, and most of them went on to receive huge year-end bonuses. Joseph Cassano of AIG Financial Products—known as “Mr. Credit-Default Swap”—led a unit that required a $99 billion bailout while simultaneously distributing $1.5 billion in year-end bonuses to his employees—including $34 million to himself. Robert Rubin of Citibank received a $10 million bonus in 2008 while serving on the board of directors of a company that required $63 billion in federal funds to keep from failing. Lower down the pay scale, more than 5,000 Wall Street traders received bonuses of $1 million or more despite working for nine of the financial firms that received the most bailout money from the US goverment.”
― Sebastian Junger, Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging

“The way my father put it completely turned the issue around for me: suddenly the draft card wasn’t so much an obligation as a chance to be part of something bigger than myself. And he’d made it clear that if the United States embarked on a war that I felt was wrong, I could always refuse to go; in his opinion, protesting an immoral war was just as honorable as fighting a moral one. Either way, he made it clear that my country needed help protecting the principles and ideals that I’d benefited from my entire life. In”
― Sebastian Junger, Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging

“In all cultures, ceremonies are designed to communicate the experience of one group of people to the wider community. When people bury loved ones, when they wed, when they graduate from college, the respective ceremonies communicate something essential to the people who are watching... if contemporary America doesn’t develop ways to publicly confront the emotional consequences of war those consequences will continue to burn a hole through the vets themselves... ...Offer veterans all over the country the use of their town hall every Veteran’s Day to speak freely about their experience at war... A community ceremony like that would finally return the experience of war to our entire nation, rather than just leaving it to the people who fought. The bland phrase “I support the troops” would then mean showing up at the town hall once a year to hear these people out.”
― Sebastian Junger, Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging

“Unlike criticism, contempt is particularly toxic because it assumes a moral superiority in the speaker.”
― Sebastian Junger, Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging