Reflections

About saving yourself individually

This current people is much more socially fragmented, beaten in its lowest strata, and universally eaten away in its understanding of things due to the contents that rain down on it from everywhere. In this bombardment of images, slogans, and memes, the local and global right plays an important role, which is shaping a new world of expectations and values. Social justice is no longer the convening ideal. It is no longer the famous fifty-fifty between capital and labor that synthesizes popular aspirations. Now it sounds quite like saving oneself individually, being able to manage with one’s own finances, being able to protect oneself from inclement inflation, being able to survive despite the country sinking.

Ricardo Aronskind

About children who do not wander

Children hardly ever wander, even in the safest places. Because of their parents’ fear of the awful things that might happen (and do happen, but from time to time) they are deprived of the wonderful things that almost always happen. In my case, that wandering during childhood was what made me develop self-confidence, a sense of direction and adventure, imagination, the desire to explore, the ability to lose myself a little and then find my way back. I wonder what the consequences will be of having this generation under house arrest.

Rebecca Solnit

About corporate power

Corporate power over markets, societies, and the environment is a fact of everyday life around the world. It is visible in inflated prices for consumer goods, rent extraction from developing markets, ‘greenwashing’ and vaccine apartheid. But the structural underpinnings of that power—and, crucially, of corporate impunity—remain mostly invisible.

Anastasia Nesvetailova