Quote from [My Year Of Meats] by Ruth Ozeki (FB post)

Fresh off two separate Jane Goodall's outings last week; having just finished reading Ruth Ozeki's [My Year Of Meats] (definitely not what I expected when I started); and halfway watching Leonardo D's [Before The Flood] documentary; and also signed up to go to the Cowspiracy Screening by Malaysian Nature Society - I am juggling between trouble-shooting at work and self-reflective mode. The need to balance work and life, rest and work, and to simplify, and empathise. 

I will take my time to organise my thoughts of them all in due time, in the meantime I am compelled to remind us, an excerpt from Ozeki's novel, in the second last chapter of [My Year Of Meats]: 

"I would like to think of my 'ignorance' less as a personal failing and more as a massive cultural trend, an example of doubling, or psychic numbing, that characterises the end of the millennium. if we can't act on knowledge, then we can't survive without ignorance. So we cultivate the ignorance, go to great lengths to celebrate it, even. The faux-dumb aesthetic that dominates TV and Hollywood must be about this. Fed on a media diet of really bad news, we live in a perpetual state of repressed panic. We are paralysed by bad knowledge, from which the only escape is playing dumb. Ignorance becomes empowering because it enables people to live. Stupidity becomes proactive, a political statement. Our collective norm." 

#reading #reflecting #goodreads #RuthOzeki #janetwrites #books #novels#JaneGoodall