Thoughts on cost-effectiveness

To witness history even in this so very modest scale is to see lives casually thrown away. One can of course trace the causes, the pathways of power, blind and random, but that does not amount to very much - at most a sillily righteous relief of having avoided the fate of the less fortunate. There surely will never be a safe place for us, a home, here, and what we have, what we experience, is all there is: lives casually thrown away. We have to deaden ourselves to survive in the world. There is a certain bleakness, a certain terror even, in our experience, but that is not all there is: there are countering factors, love, art, the long views. A beautiful landscape certainly - but ice cold.