However dreary your day, or stifling your job, just be glad you don’t live in Mogadishu, Somalia. This article from today’s New York Times, by reporter Jeffrey Gettleman, gives us a glimpse of one of the most wretched places on Earth.
It is easy enough to sit back at aloof and luxurious remove and fling curmudgeonly barbs at the preening popinjays and benighted saps who bray and caper upon the stage; after all, everyone needs a hobby. But when one thinks of the intractable misery in this world, the inexhaustible capacity people have for making others suffer, and the fact that, for most people who have ever lived, their lot has been little but misery, hunger, anguish, and death, it really isn’t funny at all.