It is raining / contemplating my evil nature

I have this book somewhere in the boxes. Thanks to Tom for sending this quote to me (yay Tom!)--he knows how I feel about guilt. Or rather, that I think about guilt. And art. And the Left.

"The reaction to the suffering of oppressed minorities at home is not very different from the brutal apathy towards the misery we have imposed elsewhere in the world....Anger, outrage, confessions of overwhelming guilt may be good therapy; they can also become a barrier to effective action, which can always be made to seem incommensurable with the enormity of the crime. Nothing is easier to adopt than a new form of self-indulgence, no less debilitating than the old apathy. The danger is substantial. It is hardly a novel insight that confession of guilt can be institutionalized as a technique for evading what must be done. It is even possible to achieve a feeling of satisfaction by contemplating one's evil nature." (Noam Chomsky's American Power and the New Mandarins, p. 17)

~

It has never rained during the day the whole time I've been here, which isn't that long, but still. My boss said "sometimes we can get up to three weeks of rain in February" and I said "really, three whole weeks."

But, in the time it took me to type this, the rain has ended.