Wednesday Award for the Worst Place in the World

Published July 29, 2009 @ 08:35AM PT

A friend recently sent this quote by Susan Sontag, which seemed rather appropriate for the Wednesday Awards:

"To designate a hell is not, of course, to tell us anything about how to extract people from that hell, how to moderate hell¹s flames. still, it seems a good in itself to acknowledge, to have enlarged, one¹s sense of how much suffering is caused by human wickedness there is in the world we share with others. someone who is perennially surprised that depravity exists, who continues to feel disillusioned (even incredulous) when confronted with evidence of what humans are capable of inflicting in the way of gruesome, hands-on cruelties upon other humans, has not reached moral or psychological adulthood. no one after a certain age has the right to this kind of innocence, of superficiality, to this degree of ignorance, or amnesia."

- Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others

[Image from www.someecards.com]

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Comments (1)

Not sure Sontag is entirely right. I often read reports and come across somehting that makes me think, gaaaaaah, I've never heard of *that* way of killing someone before. Of course, this now happens much less frequently than it used to.

Posted by Transitionl... . on 07/29/2009 @ 01:49PM PT
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Michael has worked for NGOs in Afghanistan, across east and central Africa, and Iraq. Prior to going overseas, he worked on a project providing assistance to the United Nations on the application of International Humanitarian Law to the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict.