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5a76374
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Some economists argue that the apparent paradox rests on an illusion: there is no real 'labor shortage,' only a shortage of people willing to work at the wages currently being offered. You might as well talk about a 'Lexus shortage' -- which there is, in a sense, for anyone unwilling to pay $40,000 for a car.
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Barbara Ehrenreich |
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7af1ff2
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I spent the first few months of graduate school pretending to be a student of theoretical physics. This required no great acting skill beyond the effort to appear unperturbed in the face of the inexplicable, which is as far as I can see one of the central tasks of adulthood.
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Barbara Ehrenreich |
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ffe9df0
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But who could resist the erotic lives of atoms and molecules - the violent passion of electrostatic attractions, the comfortable mutuality of covalent bonds, the gentle air kisses of van der Waals forces? The rules governing the couplings and uncouplings of tiny particles seemed to me as fascinating as the kinship rules of what we still called "primitive" societies - with the revulsion of like-charged particles, for example, functioning as ..
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chemistry
erotic
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Barbara Ehrenreich |
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e6a6bda
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My guess is that the indignities imposed on so many low-wage workers--the drug tests, the constant surveillance, being "reamed out" by managers--are part of what keeps wages low. If you're made to feel unworthy enough, you may come to think that what you're paid is what you are actually worth. It is hard to imagine any other function for workplace authoritarianism. Managers may truly believe that, without their unremitting efforts, all work..
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Barbara Ehrenreich |
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bd27675
|
Sometimes we need to heed our fears and negative thoughts, and at all times we need to be alert to the world outside ourselves, even when that includes absorbing bad news and entertaining the views of "negative" people."
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Barbara Ehrenreich |
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68c43cb
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I had discovered that writing--with whatever instrument--was a powerful aid to thinking, and thinking was what I now resolved to do.
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Barbara Ehrenreich |
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b108eee
|
Almost everyone smokes as if their pulmonary well-being depended on it -- the multinational melange of gooks; the dishwashers, who are all Czechs here; the servers, who are American natives -- creating an atmosphere in which oxygen is only an occasional pollutant. My first morning at Jerry's, when the hypoglycemic shakes set in, I complain to one of my fellow servers that I don't understand how she can go so long without food. 'Well, I don'..
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Barbara Ehrenreich |
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c1cdb3b
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As far as I can see, even now, after years of puzzling over the field of cognitive science, there is no clear line between entities to which science attributes mind and those it regards as mindless mechanisms.
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Barbara Ehrenreich |
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7a6597a
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Somehow human authority is never enough; we must have special effects.
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human
special-effects
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Barbara Ehrenreich |
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4189e54
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I expected, as I approached the corporate world, to enter a brisk, logical, nonsense-free zone, almost like the military - or a disciplined, up-to-date military anyway - in its focus on concrete results. How else would companies survive fierce competition? But what I encountered was a culture riven with assumptions unrelated to those that underlie the fact- and logic-based worlds of, say science and journalism - a culture addicted to untest..
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bias
biased
conformity
corporate-america
corporate-culture
corporate-world
logic
military
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Barbara Ehrenreich |
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67c0c8f
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At issue is not only knowledge of the world but our survival as individuals and as a species. All the basic technologies ever invented by humans to feed and protect themselves depend on a relentless commitment to hard-nosed empiricism: you cannot assume that your arrowheads will pierce the hide of a bison or that your raft will float just because the omens are propitious and you have been given supernatural reassurance that they will. You h..
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Barbara Ehrenreich |
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d34d48e
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mostly I saw her efforts to induct me into adulthood much as a calf might see its mother's explanations of veal: I was being recruited into the great death march of biology--be born, reproduce, die.
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Barbara Ehrenreich |
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8a6062d
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Everyone in yuppie-land -- airports, for example -- looks like a nursing baby these days, inseparable from their plastic bottles of water. Here, however, I sweat without replacement or pause, not in individual drops but in continuous sheets of fluid soaking through my polo shirt, pouring down the backs of my legs ... Working my way through the living room(s), I wonder if Mrs. W. will ever have occasion to realize that every single doodad an..
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Barbara Ehrenreich |
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ae04067
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Something is wrong, very wrong, when a single person in good health, a person who in addition possesses a working car, can barely support herself by the sweat of her brow. You don't need a degree in economics to see that wages are too low and rents too high.
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Barbara Ehrenreich |
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fece39c
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The "working poor," as they are approvingly termed, are in fact the major philanthropists of our society. They neglect their own children so that the children of others will be cared for; they live in substandard housing so that other homes will be shiny and perfect; they endure privation so that inflation will be low and stock prices high. To be a member of the working poor is to be an anonymous donor, a nameless benefactor, to everyone el..
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Barbara Ehrenreich |
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4b86015
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I dust a whole shelf of books on pregnancy, breastfeeding, the first six months, the first year, the first two years -- and I wonder what the child care-deprived Maddy makes of all this. Maybe there's been some secret division of the world's women into breeders and drones, and those at the maid level are no longer supposed to be reproducing at all. Maybe this is why our office manager, Tammy, who was once a maid herself, wears inch-long fak..
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Barbara Ehrenreich |
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8ba950e
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Too bad for any parent who has become accustomed to ruling by force, because at some point the kids just get too big to slap around.
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parenting
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Barbara Ehrenreich |
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ba31a1f
|
I don't think you have ever really inhabited a city until you have walked down the street and seen every single person, no matter how unlikely or different from yourself, how disheveled or foreign, as a potential ally or recruit.
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city
connection
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Barbara Ehrenreich |
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be18edf
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If this was mental illness, or even just a particularly clinical case of adolescence, I was bearing up pretty well.
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teenagers
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Barbara Ehrenreich |
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274a70b
|
We were beginning to see that the medical profession, at the time still over 90 percent male, had transformed childbirth from a natural event into a surgical operation performed on an unconscious patient in what approximated a sterile environment. Routinely, the woman about to give birth was subjected to an enema, had her pubic hair shaved off, and was placed in the lithotomy position - on her back, with knees up and crotch spread wide open..
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childbirth
risks
woman
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Barbara Ehrenreich |
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196f754
|
I smoke. It's expensive. It's also the best option. You see, I am always, always exhausted. It's a stimulant. When I am too tired to walk one more step, I can smoke and go for another hour. When I am enraged and beaten down and incapable of accomplishing one more thing, I can smoke and feel a little better, just for a minute. It is the only relaxation I am allowed.
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smoke
stimulant
tired
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Barbara Ehrenreich |
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b29dc0c
|
We do not look into mirrors, for example, to see our "true" selves, but to see what others are seeing, and what passes for inner reflection is often an agonizing assessment of how others are judging us."
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Barbara Ehrenreich |
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5c21d21
|
Why shouldn't our "great chain of being" include the other creatures with which we have shared the planet, the creatures we have martyred in service to us or driven out of their homes to make way for our expansion?"
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Barbara Ehrenreich |
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1514520
|
If there is a lesson here it has to do with humility. For all our vaunted intelligence and complexity, we are not the sole authors of our destinies or of anything else. You may exercise diligently, eat a medically fashionable diet, and still die of a sting from an irritated bee. You may be a slim, toned paragon of wellness, and still a macrophage within your body may decide to throw in its lot with an incipient tumor.
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destinies
humility
intelligence
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Barbara Ehrenreich |
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254c9c3
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Purge everyone who "brings you down," and you risk being very lonely or, what is worse, cut off from reality."
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Barbara Ehrenreich |
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220a66f
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In today's world, other people have become an obstacle to our individual pursuits.
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Barbara Ehrenreich |
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1b5e82a
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According to Wal-Mart expert Bob Ortega, Sam Walton got the idea for the cheer on a 1975 trip to Japan, "where he was deeply impressed by factory workers doing group calisthenics and company cheers." Ortega describes Walton conducting a cheer: "'Gimme a W!' he'd shout. 'W!' the workers would shout back, and on through the Wal-Mart name. At the hyphen, Walton would shout 'Gimme a squiggly!' and squat and twist his hips at the same time; the ..
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Barbara Ehrenreich |
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6cd9b10
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The most flattering spin I can put on this phase of paradoxes and metaphysical tangles is that I was smart enough, at age fourteen, to destroy any fledgling hypothesis I came up with. A tentative explanation, theory, or formulation would pop up in my brain only to be attacked by what amounted to a kind of logical immune system, bent on eliminating all that was weak or defective. Which is to say that my mind had become a scene of furious pre..
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metaphysics
philosophy
rationality
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Barbara Ehrenreich |
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e36f01a
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We were not supposed to know anything about our own bodies or to participate in decision-making about our own care.
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Barbara Ehrenreich |
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95f7f32
|
I was an answer-seeking machine, in love with what I called "the truth," whether it came in the form of little truth particles stuck to the pages of books or vast patterns screaming out from the obvious and mundane."
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seeking
truth
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Barbara Ehrenreich |
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46ffcd3
|
Life" is of course a misnomer, since viruses, lacking the ability to eat or respire, are officially dead, which is in itself intriguing, showing as it does that the habit of predation can be taken up by clusters of molecules that are in no way alive."
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viruses
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Barbara Ehrenreich |
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db125d8
|
The universe does not reveal itself to undergraduates or fools: This is the entire premise of higher education.
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enlightenment
universe
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Barbara Ehrenreich |
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c1533fb
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You can and should use logic and reason all you want. But it would be a great mistake to ignore the stray bit of data that doesn't fit into your preconceived theories, that may even confound everything you thought you were sure of.
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Barbara Ehrenreich |
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49818f1
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To fight against a war or, better yet, an entire "war machine," we had to become warriors ourselves. This is the cunning symmetry of war: Enemies tend to come to resemble one another. And this was perhaps especially so in a culture that appallingly--to us--applied the war meme to just about anything, as in the "War on Poverty."
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war
warrior
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Barbara Ehrenreich |
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4046163
|
As a recent editorial in the Journal of Clinical Oncology put it: "What we must first remember is that the immune system is designed to detect foreign invaders, and avoid out own cells. With few exceptions, the immune system does not appear to recognize cancers within an individual as foreign, because they are actually part of the self."
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cancer
clinical-oncology
immune-system
medicine
oncology
positive-thinking
psychology
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Barbara Ehrenreich |
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6585095
|
Science "works", of course, but from an aesthetic point of view, was it really a great improvement over mythology? Why do we insist that theories "work", when they might just as well sit around and look pretty? I couldn't help observing that for every advance in science...some perfectly competent goddess or demiurge is put out of work, a hypothesized spirit dies, or a living thing surrenders its autonomy."
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Barbara Ehrenreich |
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251f8c2
|
As Eckhart, one of Otto's many sources, had asserted centuries earlier, referring to the Other as "God," the religious seeker must set aside "any idea about God as being good, wise, [or] compassionate."
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religion
seeking
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Barbara Ehrenreich |
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6bf9cff
|
What I wanted from people was simple enough. I wanted them to rush up to me and to each other and say, "Oh my God, what is this? What is happening here?" I wanted them to come pouring out of their houses and cars calling out, "Look at this! Just look at this! Do you see what I see? The strange juice rising in the grass and the trees, the great freely given, unearned beneficence of the sun?" In my fantasy some of them would buttonhole strang..
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Barbara Ehrenreich |
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cec9ebf
|
Sometimes Carlie hands me the squirt bottle of "Bam" (an acronym for something that begins, ominously, with "butyric" - the rest of it has been worn off the label) and lets me do the bathrooms. No service ethic challenges me here to new heights of performance. I just concentrate on removing the pubic hairs from the bathtubs, or at least the dark ones that I can see." --
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pubic
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Barbara Ehrenreich |
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464516d
|
That's what science is about: seeing the exact same things that other people do, finding the units of measurement with which to describe those things, communicating in the fewest and most precise words available. What could be saner--or more sociable--than that?
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Barbara Ehrenreich |
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3e18d83
|
Yes, atheists pray in their foxholes--in this case, with a yearning new to me and sharp as lust, for a clean and honorable death by shark bite, lightning strike, sniper fire, car crash. Let me be hacked to death by a madman, was my silent supplication--anything but suffocation by the pink sticky sentiment embodied in that bear and oozing from the walls of the changing room. I didn't mind dying, but the idea that I should do so while clutchi..
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Barbara Ehrenreich |
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3f8947c
|
Poor whites had always had the comfort of knowing that someone was worse off and more despised than they were; racial subjugation was the ground under their feet, the rock they stood upon, even when their own situation was deteriorating. That slender assurance is shrinking.
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racial-subjugation
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Barbara Ehrenreich |
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66a026d
|
In fact, the idea of a God who is both all-powerful and all good is a logical impossibility.
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logic
omnipotence
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Barbara Ehrenreich |
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0ac34e9
|
Al final, la felicidad se mide a partir de la satisfaccion que una persona declara sentir sobre su propia vida, y quiza sea mas sencillo estar satisfecho con ella si uno tiene dinero, se cine a las normas sociales, acomoda sus juicios a lo que diga la iglesia y no se preocupa demasiado por las injusticias.
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Barbara Ehrenreich |