Words&Dirt

“‘They can forget about it,’ Ayumi said. ‘I never can.’

‘Of course not,’ Aomame said.

‘It’s like some historic massacre.’

‘Massacre?’

‘The ones who did it can always rationalize their actions and even forget what they did. They can turn away from things they don’t want to see. But the surviving victims can never forget. They can’t turn away. Their memories are passed on from parent to child. That’s what the world is, after all: an endless battle of contrasting memories.’”

––1Q84, by Haruki Murakami, pg. 293

“The underlying problem, then, is not that average working Americans are ‘worth’ less in the market than they had been, or that they have been living beyond their means. The problem is that they have steadily lost the bargaining power needed to receive as large a portion of the economy’s gains as they commanded in the first three decades after World War II, and their means have not kept up with what the economy could otherwise provide them. To attribute this to the impersonal workings of the ‘free market’ is to ignore how the market has been reorganized since the 1980s, and by whom. It is to disregard the power of moneyed interests who have received a steadily larger share of economic gains as a result of that power. It is not to acknowledge that as their gains have continued to accumulate, so has their power to accumulate even more. And it is to overlook the marked decline of countervailing power in our political-economic system.”

––Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few, by Robert B. Reich, pg. 131-2