Explore "The Commerce of Violence" by Wendell Berry on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
ON THE DAY of the bombing in Boston, The New York Times printed an op-ed piece by a human being who had been imprisoned at Guantanamo for more than eleven years, uncharged and of course untried. The occurrence of these two events on the same day was a coincidence, but that does not mean that they are unrelated.
What connects them is our devaluation, and when convenient our disvaluation, of human life as well as the earthly life of which human life is a dependent part. This cheapening of life, and the violence that inevitably accompanies it, is surely the dominant theme of our time. The ease and quickness with which we resort to violence would be astounding if it were not conventional.