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Requiem for a Woman's Soul

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Omar Rivabella

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“While one might laugh at the meaningless boredom of people a decade or two ago, the emptiness has for many now moved from the state of boredom to a state of futility and despair which holds promise of dangers. The human being cannot live in a condition of emptiness for very long: if he is not growing toward something, he does not merely stagnate; the pent-up potentialities turn into morbidity and despair, and eventually into destructive activities. The feeling of emptiness or vacuity generally comes from people's feeling that they are powerless to do anything effective about their lives or the world they live in. Inner vacuousness is the long-term, accumulated result of a person's particular conviction about himself, namely his conviction that he cannot act as an entity in directing his own life... And soon, since what he wants and what he feels can make no real difference, he gives up wanting and feeling. Apathy and lack of feeling are also defenses against anxiety. When a person continually faces danger he is powerless to overcome, his final line of defense is at last to avoid even feeling the dangers.”

“It's disgusting," Letty said. "Can you believe - I mean, a Babel graduate, and they just act like he was never here?" Her distress belied a deeper terror, a terror which Robin felt as well, which was that Anthony had been expendable. That they were all expendable. That this tower - this place where they had for the first time found belonging - treasured and loved them when they were alive and useful but didn't, in fact, care about them at all. That they were, in the end, only vessels for the languages they spoke. No one said that out loud. It came too close to breaking the spell.”

“Trump and others on the right want to make sure that working-class white men don’t want to go to college and distrust those who do, and conservative educators want to make sure that people from marginalized communities don’t want to go either. All of this works by design. It is to ensure that enough of us keep our heads down, focus on surviving our nine-to-five jobs, don’t ask questions, and don’t demand more from a system that owes us a lot. The death of American higher education will harm the most vulnerable of us first, but its goal is not to harm or oppress only us—that work is fully implanted in all our systems. Its goal is to continue to oppress and exploit white supremacy’s most powerful tool: the angry white working-class man.”

“Once again," he said, "we have failed pathetically. Quite pathetically." "That," said Ford quietly, "is because we don't care enough. I told you." He swung his feet up onto the intrument panel and picked fitfully at something on one of his fingernails. "But unless we determine to take action," said the old man querulously, as if struggling against something deeply insouciant in his nature, "then we shall be destroyed; we shall all die. Surely we care about that?" "Not enough to want to get killed over it," said Ford. He put on a sort of hollow smile and flipped it around the room at anyone who wanted to see it.”