Ryan Cooper

TNC has the best comment section on the internet.  One of his regulars came up with this gem that really must be read in full.  I still have days where I am very happy that I'm not in jail, dead, addicted to something, or paying child-support to a woman I don't love. There but for the grace of god go I. It could have happened, a kid I used to spend time with when we were growing up went to jail a few years ago for rape. My little brother's best friend was stabbed three days before he was supposed to graduate. My best friend in high-school who I haven't heard from in years --a person who was at one time head and shoulders above me in intelligence, dropped-out, obtained his GED, and is presumably working a dead end job somewhere. I haven't heard from him in years, and it breaks my heart to think of what might have been under different circumstances. I hope he is doing well, but we cannot however hard we wish go back and try to re-create or change the past. No one...

This post certainly sparked some discussion both in comments and email about several topics, but I'd like to concentrate on how my friend's rationale overlapped with my own for joining Peace Corps. One person used "bored" in correspondence to describe his feelings, but I think a better term would be alienation. Profound alienation. The United States, for all its vast material prosperity, is notorious for this sort of thing. Call it what you will—spiritual fulfillment, purpose, meaning, whatever, often one confronts only a sucking void of meaningless acquisition and consumption that is actively complicit in wrecking the planet. Those of a philosophic or analytic bent are most prone to it, I reckon, particularly if none of the mass-production religions holds any attraction. I sympathize deeply with this sense of alienation, though I feel it less strongly than my friend. This is, I believe , because of my roots in the river culture of the Southwest, something that...

A friend of mine recently signed up for the Special Forces, and he sent along some thoughts on why he did it. Suffice to say it's not exactly the normal reason. I'm reprinting it below with permission. "I was finally feeling cracks begin to form in my skull from the benign day-to-day life of this place. While fun, the school work wasn't exactly challenging me. I had been working two jobs since I came up to [REDACTED], leaving very little time to actually have an "American College experience" (not that I can say I would have enjoyed such a lifestyle any more or less). I came up here thinking I'd find something different. I assumed that, through school, I could find something to eventually do with myself. Instead, I found a city full of people happily headed down a path of materialism and overconsumption. Even in my "environmental science" classes, I found a generation of people who babble about how important recycling is to our survival before ...