Many things had changed in the Philippines, but some things I didn't have the heart to go see whether they'd changed or not. There's a ski slope-sized pile of rotting, burning trash on the north side of town called Smokey Mountain. A thousand people, many of them sick and dying, live in the filth. I never want to go back there. There are some kinds of desolation that leave you impotent in the fucking that's life.
I could turn my pockets out for the Smokey Mountain residents, but that wouldn't go far. I could throw up, but I don't see how that would help. I could pester the dump-pickers as I had in '86 and write it up in a colorful way and make a buck off the whole thing, which I guess is what I'm doing anyway. I asked my photographer friend Gianni, who'd just been to shoot the place, if Smokey Mountain had changed.
"It's bigger." he said.
"But are the people any better off?"
"Yeah, they've got more garbage."
- paraphrased from PJ O'Rourke, Holidays in Hell
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4 comments:
This is the passage that comes to my mind when a politician promises to reform such-and-such.
What does it mean to reform? What does it mean to change? Sometimes changes don't really change anything at all.
I'm actually thinking about leaving the school I'm in for a school across town. I keep thinking I want to change it up, to see something new, be around new people...but at the same time, in the back of my mind I keep thinking exactly what you said- sometimes change doesn't change much at all. So would it be worth it to move schools?
Haha, it depends how cynical you are.
Nah, I would say it depends on your goals. If what you want is to meet new people, or teach in a different classroom, then changing makes sense to me.
If what you want is to break the monotony of teaching, then it just seems like you're trading one monotony for another.
I think it's a combination of both, actually. I want to break up the monotony, and I think it's possible by being a new environment (the new school is a complete 180 from the one I'm at now).
I don't know. First I better get an offer at the new school before anything.
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