New Year's amnesia

[we] live in a world of comparative calm that is, at some remove, deeply unsettling. We spend our mornings rifling through the papers, scrolling through our bright screen display, consuming and digesting the latest breathless reportage from the centers of power. Yet we are far from the action. We live in our prefab arcadias, urban enclaves soothed by ubiquitous white noise, zoom along spotless highway tracts between corporate campuses and homogenized shopping centers, half their storefronts empty, like the glass-paneled ghost towns of a forgotten consumer frontier. Our corporate offices are muffled spaces. The low hum of the building core lulls its drones into a kind of quiescent repose. Repetitive motion injuries advance in the breezeless hush of the office. Colleagues speak in low tones, particularly the men, a generation of halting, soft-spoken males anxious to embody non-aggressive communication styles in a new world of trigger warnings and harassment complaints. We pace through crowds pacified by the narcotic haze of Big Pharma, desensitized to the booming retail carnival that envelops us. Yet there is, outside the high walls of the metropole, violent coercion at work on behalf of the giant engines of capital, a kind of muted savagery whose cries we only faintly decipher amid the din of our merchandised mayhem.
    -- Jason Hirthler