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Mme. Defarge

(7,981 posts)
Thu Aug 25, 2022, 09:35 AM Aug 2022

Stop improving things right now! Everyone must suffer as I did!

By Alexandra Petri

DISGUSTING! AWFUL! I have just received word that life is getting marginally better for some people, and I am white-hot with fury! This is the worst thing that could possibly happen! I did not suffer and strive and work my fingers to the bone so that anybody else could have a life that does not involve suffering and striving and the working of fingers to the bone. I demand to see only bones and no fingers!

Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night thrashing because I have had the nightmare again, the nightmare in which someone else is being spared a small hint of the suffering I endured. The world should not get better! The world should get worse along with me and perish along with me.
Every time anyone’s life improves at all, I personally am insulted. Any time anyone devises a labor-saving device, or passes some kind of weak, soft-hearted law that forecloses the opportunity for a new generation of children to lose fingers in dangerous machinery, I gnash my teeth. This is an affront to everyone who struggled so mightily. To avoid affronting them, we must keep everything just as bad as ever. Put those fingers back into the machines, or our suffering will have been in vain.

When I see unleaded paint or un-asbestosed homes, I froth at the mouth and start stomping up and down like Rumpelstiltskin. And who are we to think we deserve better than to die of sepsis? Why shouldn’t smallpox be out in the world for us as it once was? Are we too good for scurvy, now? Our great-grandparents made do without penicillin, did they not?

What a fallen, broken world we live in. The audacity of people trying to eat food not contaminated by waste, or increase the number of rhinos in the wild — they had better not! Clean the air? YOU STOP THAT RIGHT NOW. Inhaling thick lungfuls of coal smoke was miserable for me, and it will be miserable for you. Put the cockroaches back into the kitchen, please, and lye back into the meat!

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/24/student-loan-forgiveness-suffering-satire/?pwapi_token=eyJ0eXAiOiJKV1QiLCJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiJ9.eyJzdWJpZCI6IjEwNjYzNDExIiwicmVhc29uIjoiZ2lmdCIsIm5iZiI6MTY2MTQzMzk4MSwiaXNzIjoic3Vic2NyaXB0aW9ucyIsImV4cCI6MTY2MjY0MzU4MSwiaWF0IjoxNjYxNDMzOTgxLCJqdGkiOiJkYzU5YWE3OS00MTAxLTQyOWUtOTRkZC00MWVjYzkwZTc1YzUiLCJ1cmwiOiJodHRwczovL3d3dy53YXNoaW5ndG9ucG9zdC5jb20vb3BpbmlvbnMvMjAyMi8wOC8yNC9zdHVkZW50LWxvYW4tZm9yZ2l2ZW5lc3Mtc3VmZmVyaW5nLXNhdGlyZS8ifQ.rAa0gw4huoTJDfFxakuLxguGMG5wgiEasNiVWyMSxLY

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