Notes on “The War for Drugs: Sarah Hill on how Juárez became the world’s deadliest city”

Seems Detroit (and the Midwest in general) isn’t the only town to lose auto industry jobs. Mexico has also been hit, according to this article by Sarah Hill, and the consequences are at least as devastating.

~ ~ ~

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer[...] 

Ah, the trickle down of the past two decades (two, or more? is “this time” really so different? can it validly be removed from the Cold War? The World Wars? The Great Depression? Etc?). The economic stupidity, brought home by the fact that one of my recent students—a middle-aged woman who is now getting her degree after having long done the work of a college graduate—lost her job of some twenty years to Mexico’s cheaper labor.

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned[...]

They give, they take away, and they give to someone else only to take away again. Perennial cost-cutting combined with constant overproduction targeted at the folks whose wages you’ve cut and whose jobs you’ve shipped elsewhere in order to drive down the costs of the products you need those same folks to buy in order to keep the whole thing going so that you’re left peddling an ever-increasing glut of credit just to oil the gears equals unsustainability. Is this even debatable?

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity[...]

Propping up unsustainability in a world about to crash anyway? Necessary insanity (supposedly). Excuse me if I don’t think it’s an objectively great system, despite the current lack of an obviously better one. Any other system about to emerge seems unlikely to do so apart from a violent upheaval that already probably cannot be stopped but only put off a while longer.

Does that sound absurd? I’m sure people thought the same before America’s Civil War. Before each of the World Wars. Voices no one wants to hear. That which you cannot read in the news but only sense somewhere between the headlines.

Surely some revelation is at hand[...]

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun[...]

When you set forces in motion…

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?

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