Our need to keep health care obscenely profitable is responsible for shortening lives and causing needless pain. We seem not to be able to make the connection when ad campaigns by insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies, and hospital chains bombard our airwaves. Someone is paying for those ads. We try not to think about who that might be.

Our roads and bridges and buildings are crumbling and we’re supposed to believe there is no money to fix them. We wait for the inevitable disaster that will open the vault to the funds hiding there all along. Large numbers of people will have to die as a sacrifice before more can live.

Private interests are carpet-bombing the land of the free and the home of the brave. We say we don’t know how to stop them, apparently not even noticing that we’ve made a habit of nurturing and promoting politicians who make no secret of their allegiance to them.

But I’m not telling you anything you didn’t already know.

So why aren’t we talking about these things all day every day until something gets done about them? Why aren’t we seeing periodic updates on these insults to the human spirit on the news?

—Ramona Grigg
The Things We Leave Undone While We Sweat the Small Stuff