Imagine working as a food inspector. And an air quality measurement expert. And a drug purity chemist. And a supply-chain HAACP consultant. Imagine doing all of those things every single day for everything you eat, breathe, swallow, or purchase. Imagine living in a country where the assumption is that at any point, you’re going to get cheated, and it might kill you. Imagine shopping like a regular civilian in China.
The people trying to cheat you only have to get good at cheating in one way, but you have to deal with dozens of people trying to cheat you all the damn time. The asymmetry means that one civilian food-safety enthusiast might catch the melamine in the milk and the industrially recycled grease in the cooking oil but will eventually miss the lead in the tea and the cadmium in the butter… and that’s just food. They’re playing this game in every aspect of their lives.
It sounds exhausting and infuriating and terrifying. When you can’t trust anyone or anything, everything is a threat.
It also sounds a lot like the experience of being a down-and-out opioid addict in the US. Except I suppose that in the US, you only have to worry about the purity of your street drugs. You can be sure that the bottled water you buy to shoot up with is actually purified, for example. The harm-reduction clinic down on Methadone Mile knows the needles it buys aren’t haphazardly autoclaved or pre-used and repackaged. The alcohol you buy to knock yourself out when you can’t get a fix isn’t tainted with lead and methanol.
When you can’t trust anyone or anything, everything is a threat.
One of the few other areas of American consumption that’s tainted by extreme levels of distrust is media. I gotta get my news fix, but I only trust Steve and Ainsley… And when Fox tells you nothing is trustworthy and you can’t trust anyone, everything is a threat. And when everything is a threat, and you’re living in fear, demagogues take power.
I wonder whether, in coming to China, I have stepped into America’s future, not its past.
Most people do not realize just how deeply their expectations run, nor how profoundly they believe that they are universal. It is existentially shattering to find that this is not the case. These divisions about what we want our government to do have always been there, but they have led us to a peculiar place.
In conclusion, capitalism is destroying the fabric of social trust in communist China, and Fox News is the fentanyl of the masses.
Cultivating Despair
Once again, let me restate the wonders of the EJI Calendar of Racial Injustice. I’ve been looking up all my friends’ birthday injustice. Some of the dates are inspiring, especially if you get a birthday wrong by one day.
Yeah, turns out my friend’s birthday isn’t an initial setback in the fight for true love conquering all. It’s an incident where an entire town was destroyed in 1923, and nobody’s quite sure how many people were murdered because a mob just burned a mostly-black village to ashes and killed anyone who didn’t run.
Now who wants some birthday cake?
Serve and Protect
On Friday, an officer was acquitted in the shooting death of an unarmed man lying facedown on a carpet begging for his life. Video footage of what is somehow not counted as murder is public record.
Cultivating hope
This meditation on sperm whales: “And so they go on. Not because they are brave, or curious, or pioneering – but because evolution has simultaneously damned them to daily katabasis, and given them the monstrous power to overcome it.”
Cultivating joy
You can stop wearing deliberately ugly Christmas sweaters now, because NOTHING will ever top this one.
I guess this human is harmless, I’ll go ahead and lie down OH NOooooooooooo.
This giant cat bed has some drawbacks… Cat in cat-shaped cat-scratching cat-house… curly-haired kitten.
Snowball-catching dog… puppy not quite coordinated enough to play.
Secretly Ironic 