01c. 1981 ADBut Jesus makes his appearance here only as a corpse; the living man, the wine-guzzling vagrant and precocious socialist, is never once mentioned, nor anything he ever had to say. Christ crucified rules, and it may be that the true business of modern Christianity is to crucify him again and again so that he can never get a word out of his mouth.Barbara Ehrenreich / quote ↗
02c. 1981 ADJust as layoffs were making a mockery of the team concept, employees were urged to find camaraderie and a sense of collective purpose at the microlevel of the "team". And the less teamlike the overall organization became with the threat of continuous downsizing, the more management insisted on individual devotion to these largely fictional units.Barbara Ehrenreich / quote ↗
03c. 1981 ADI was raised the old-fashioned way, with a stern set of moral principles: Never lie, cheat, steal or knowingly spread a venereal disease. Never speed up to hit a pedestrian or, or course, stop to kick a pedestrian who has already been hit. From which it followed, of course, that one would never ever -- on pain of deletion from dozens of Christmas card lists across the country -- vote Republican.Barbara Ehrenreich / quote ↗
04c. 1981 ADOf all the nasty outcomes predicted for women's liberation...none was more alarming than the suggestion that women would eventually become just like men.Barbara Ehrenreich / quote ↗
05c. 1981 ADThe question is why one should be so inwardly preoccupied at all. Why not reach out to others in love and solidarity or peer into the natural world for some glimmer of understanding? Why retreat into anxious introspection when, as Emerson might have said, there is a vast world outside to explore? Why spend so much time working on oneself when there is so much real work to be done?Barbara Ehrenreich / quote ↗
06c. 1981 ADA hint of - dare I say? - animism has entered into the scientific worldview. The physical world is no longer either dead or passively obedient to the "laws.Barbara Ehrenreich / quote ↗
07c. 1981 ADIn matters of the heart as well, a certain level of negativity and suspicion is universally recommended. You may try to project a thoroughly positive outlook in order to attract a potential boyfriend, but you are also advised to Google him.Barbara Ehrenreich / quote ↗
08c. 1981 ADThe failure to think positively can weigh on a cancer patient like a second disease.Barbara Ehrenreich / quote ↗
09c. 1981 ADHappiness, after all, is generally measured as reported satisfaction with one's life - a state of mind perhaps more accessible to those who are affluent, who conform to social norms, who suppress judgment in the service of faith, and who are not overly bothered by societal injustice...The real conservatism of positive psychology lies in its attachment to the status quo, with all its inequalities and abuses of power. Positive psychologists' tests of happiness and well-being, for example, rest heavily on measures of personal contentment with things as they are.Barbara Ehrenreich / quote ↗
10c. 1981 ADAs a recent editorial in the Journal of Clinical Oncology put it: "What we must first remember is that the immune system is designed to detect foreign invaders, and avoid out own cells. With few exceptions, the immune system does not appear to recognize cancers within an individual as foreign, because they are actually part of the self.Barbara Ehrenreich / quote ↗
11c. 1981 ADWhat would it mean in practice to eliminate all the 'negative people' from one's life? It might be a good move to separate from a chronically carping spouse, but it is not so easy to abandon the whiny toddler, the colicky infant, or the sullen teenager. And at the workplace, while it's probably advisable to detect and terminate those who show signs of becoming mass killers, there are other annoying people who might actually have something useful to say: the financial officer who keeps worrying about the bank's subprime mortgage exposure or the auto executive who questions the company's overinvestment in SUVs and trucks. Purge everyone who 'brings you down,' and you risk being very lonely, or, what is worse, cut off from reality.Barbara Ehrenreich / quote ↗
12c. 1981 ADIn my experience, any class or assembly restricted to girls was going to be in some way degrading, like the one where we'd been convened to receive the information that from now on our bodies would be producing poisons that would need to be discharged on a monthly basis, through an unspecified orifice. The restriction of the typing requirement to girls suggested some sort of connection between our festering genitals and the need to serve in a clerical-type occupation, perhaps as a punishment.Barbara Ehrenreich / quote ↗
13c. 1981 ADA lot of what we experience as strength comes from knowing what to do with weakness.Barbara Ehrenreich / quote ↗
14c. 1981 ADMost accounts of mystical experiences... insist that the Other in the encounter appears to be "living" or alive, as in "living God." But is it alive in any biological sense? Does it eat and metabolize? Does it reproduce - an option that monotheism would seem to foreclose?Barbara Ehrenreich / quote ↗
15c. 1981 ADYou can talk about depression as a "chemical imbalance" all you want, but it presents itself as an external antagonist - a "demon," a "beast," or a "black dog," as Samuel Johnson called it. It could pounce at any time, even in the most innocuous setting.Barbara Ehrenreich / quote ↗
16c. 1981 ADThat's what "meaning" is—a special additive like salt or garlic that could make even the most fetid piece of meat seem palpable, even delicious.Barbara Ehrenreich / quote ↗
18c. 1981 ADIf this was mental illness, or even just a particularly clinical case of adolescence, I was bearing up pretty well.Barbara Ehrenreich / quote ↗
19c. 1981 ADBut the economic meltdown should have undone, once and for all, the idea of poverty as a personal shortcoming or dysfunctional state of mind. The lines at unemployment offices and churches offering free food includes strivers as well as slackers, habitual optimists as well as the chronically depressed. When and if the economy recovers we can never allow ourselves to forget how widespread our vulnerability is, how easy it is to spiral down toward destitution.Barbara Ehrenreich / quote ↗
20c. 1981 ADBut apparently you don't need dot-com wealth to ruin an area for its low-income residents. The Pioneer Press quotes Secretary of HUD Andrew Cuomo ruing the "cruel irony" that prosperity is shrinking the stock of affordable housing nationwide: "The stronger the economy, the stronger the upward pressure on rents.Barbara Ehrenreich / quote ↗
21c. 1981 ADPoverty is not a character failing or a lack of motivation. Poverty is a shortage of money.Barbara Ehrenreich / quote ↗
22c. 1981 ADShe represents something about the corporate world that repel me, some deep coldness masked as relentless cheerfulness.Barbara Ehrenreich / quote ↗
23c. 1981 ADIn fact the "mask" theme has come up several times in my background reading. Richard Sennett, for example, in "The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism", and Robert Jackall, in "Moral Mazes: The World of Corporate managers", refer repeatedly to the "masks" that corporate functionaries are required to wear, like actors in an ancient Greek drama. According to Jackall, corporate managers stress the need to exercise iron self-control and to mask all emotion and intention behind bland, smiling, and agreeable public faces. Kimberly seems to have perfected the requisite phoniness and even as I dislike her, my whole aim is to be welcomed into the same corporate culture that she seems to have mastered, meaning that I need to "get in the face" of my revulsion and overcome it. But until I reach that transcendent point, I seem to be stuck in an emotional space left over from my midteen years: I hate you; please love me.Barbara Ehrenreich / quote ↗
24c. 1981 ADToo bad for any parent who has become accustomed to ruling by force, because at some point the kids just get too big to slap around.Barbara Ehrenreich / quote ↗
