(no subject)
Simone de Beauvoir traveled across America in 1947, and wrote about it.
“What is most striking to me, and most discouraging, is that they are so apathetic while being neither blind nor unconscious. They know and deplore the oppression of thirteen million blacks, the terrible poverty of the South, the almost equally desperate poverty that polluted the big cities. They witness the rise, more ominous every day, of racism and reactionary attitudes - the birth of a kind of fascism. They know that their country is responsible for the world’s future. But they themselves don’t feel responsible for anything, because they don’t think they can do anything in this world. At the age of twenty, they are convinced that their thought is futile, their good intentions ineffective: ‘America is too vast and heavy a body for one individual to move it.’ And this evening I formulate what I’ve been thinking for days. In America, the individual is nothing. He is made into an abstract object of worship; by persuading him of his individual value, one stifles the awakening of a collective spirit in him. But reduced to himself in this way, he is robbed of any concrete power.”
76 freaking years ago! The fact that this quote could have been from yesterday is so disheartening.
“What is most striking to me, and most discouraging, is that they are so apathetic while being neither blind nor unconscious. They know and deplore the oppression of thirteen million blacks, the terrible poverty of the South, the almost equally desperate poverty that polluted the big cities. They witness the rise, more ominous every day, of racism and reactionary attitudes - the birth of a kind of fascism. They know that their country is responsible for the world’s future. But they themselves don’t feel responsible for anything, because they don’t think they can do anything in this world. At the age of twenty, they are convinced that their thought is futile, their good intentions ineffective: ‘America is too vast and heavy a body for one individual to move it.’ And this evening I formulate what I’ve been thinking for days. In America, the individual is nothing. He is made into an abstract object of worship; by persuading him of his individual value, one stifles the awakening of a collective spirit in him. But reduced to himself in this way, he is robbed of any concrete power.”
76 freaking years ago! The fact that this quote could have been from yesterday is so disheartening.