i love reading

I just finished a very good non-fiction book, Zeitoun, by Dave Eggers.

It is one of those books that makes you hate America, just a little. Sometimes this country seems so monumentally ridiculous. Broken, really.

Lately I've been thinking a lot, Maybe I should move to Hopenhagen.

(Hopenhagen being the name given to Copenhagen in an advertising campaign "in support" of the UN Climate Change Conference.)

Anyway. Oprah says it's the happiest city in the world. Or something like that.

It's hard sometimes not to be upset about injustice or human rights violations or natural disasters and the bureaucratic disasters that invariably follow. I think what bothers me the most is this widespread, malignant facet of human behavior that I just do not understand: lack of empathy and compassion for the suffering of other human beings. I was under the impression- erroneously, apparently- that that sort of thing is intrinsic and ingrained.

I don't know why I ever assumed that considering the entire course of human history, the preponderance of evidence. Still, though. It just seems wrong, an aberration.

It's the whole us v. them thing. The other. Dehumanization. All that noise. Somehow people can detach themselves from compassion. I don't get it, though.

I just don't.