The Anti-social Media Of A Century Past. LIFE, December 23, 1926

After all, good old Xi said he might consider not sending the US all the components they are so heavily dependent on anymore… so…

"As one reads history, not in the expurgated editions written for school-boys and passmen, but in the original authorities of each time, one is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed, but by the punishments that the good have inflicted; and a community is infinitely more brutalised by the habitual employment of punishment, than it is by the occurrence of crime. It obviously follows that the more punishment is inflicted the more crime is produced, and most modern legislation has clearly recognised this, and has made it its task to diminish punishment as far as it thinks it can. Wherever it has really diminished it, the results have always been extremely good. The less punishment, the less crime. When there is no punishment at all, crime will either cease to exist, or, if it occurs, will be treated by physicians as a very distressing form of dementia, to be cured by care and kindness. For what are called criminals nowadays are not criminals at all. Starvation, and not sin, is the parent of modern crime."

~ Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man Under Socialism, 1891. Just a few short years before his own imprisonment, which ultimately lead to his death.

"We do not have the responsibility of making gay life look good to straights so that they will accept us. I am not at all interested in promoting a cleaned up image to a straight world which is twice as corrupt and ten times as sick."

Vito Russo

Photography by Betty Lane, 1978

Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends. The question of self-pity. “At some point, in the interest of remembering what seemed most striking about what had happened, I considered adding those words, ´the ordinary instant.´ I saw immediately that there would be no need to add the word "ordinary,” because there would be no forgetting it: the word never left my mind. It was in fact the ordinary nature of everything preceding the event that prevented me from truly believing it had happened, absorbing it, incorporating it, getting past it. I recognize now that there was nothing unusual in this: confronted with sudden disaster, we all focus on how unremarkable the circumstances were in which the unthinkable occurred, the clear blue sky from which the plane fell, the routine errand that ended on the shoulder with the car in flames, the swings where the children were playing as usual when the rattlesnake struck from the ivy.“ After Life , by Joan Didion. The best text I have ever read about death, the unpredictability of life, and grief.

Odd, how the United States doesn't have enough money to give sick veterans healthcare, impoverished seniors Social Security, or hungry schoolkids lunches, but it does have enough money to pay a Central American dictator millions to torture American residents in his brutal concentration camp.