Saarah

“Brock's mother wrote, "My first thought upon wakening every morning is, This isn't real, this can't be real. Why him? Why him? Why? Why?"

I have never wondered, "Why me?" The only thing running through my head when my sister picked me up that morning, was "Thank god me. Thank god me, and not her.”
― Chanel Miller, Know My Name

“Thinking about maintenance and care for one’s kin also brings me back to a favorite book, A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster, in which Rebecca Solnit dispenses with the myth that people become desperate and selfish after disasters. From the 1906 San Franscisco earthquake to Hurricane Katrina, she gives detailed accounts of the surprising resourcefulness, empathy, and sometimes even humor that arise in dark circumstances. Several of her interviewees report feeling a strange nostalgia for the purposefulness and the connection they felt with their neighbors immediately following a disaster. Solnit suggests that the real disaster is everyday life, which alienates us from each other and from the protective impulse that we harbor.”
― Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy

“And here we are in the 21st century [...] and education has thoroughly become a commodity. It has been so thoroughly commoditized that many people don't know how to understand the very process of acquiring knowledge because it is subordinated to the future capacity to make money.”
― Angela Y. Davis, Freedom is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine and the Foundations of a Movement

“But living is an incredible thing, just to have been here, to have felt, if only briefly, the volume and depth of others' empathy. I wrote, most of all, to tell you I have seen how good the world can be.”
― Chanel Miller, Know My Name