163
" I was born to atheism and raised in it, by people who had derived their own atheism from a proud tradition of working-class rejection of authority in all its forms, whether vested in bosses or priests, gods or demons. This is what defined my people, my tribe: We did not believe, and what this meant, when I started on the path of metaphysical questioning, was that there were no ready answers at hand. My religious friends—and my friends were almost all Catholics or Protestants or occasionally something more exotic like Jewish or Greek Orthodox—were convinced that God had a “plan” for us, and since God was good, it was a good plan, which we were required to endorse even without having any idea what it was. Just sign the paperwork; in other words, don’t overintellectualize. "
― Barbara Ehrenreich , Living with a Wild God: A Nonbeliever's Search for the Truth about Everything
164
" Ah, hell. Even now, insulated by so many intervening years, I could choke on the pity of it. They started out so young and brave, my parents, and ended up such sordid messes. Only one thing saved my father from dying as a slobbering drunk, and that was Alzheimer’s disease, alcohol being unavailable in the nursing home he finally expired in. As for my mother, she didn’t live long enough to find out that I grew up to have all the things she craved, that the entire package, plus some, would be delivered exactly a generation late—the adventure, the causes, the friends and hot romances. She died, too, before we could settle things between us, on her third suicide attempt. "
― Barbara Ehrenreich , Living with a Wild God: A Nonbeliever's Search for the Truth about Everything
172
" The historian Michael Walzer has argued that modern revolution was a task for the kind of ascetic, single-minded, self-denying personality that Calvinism sought to inculcate, and certainly some of the successful revolutionaries of the West would seem to fill the bill. As we have seen, the English revolutionary leader Oliver Cromwell, a Calvinist himself, railed perpetually against the festive inclinations of his troops. The Jacobin leader Robespierre despised disorderly gatherings, including “any group in which there is a tumult”—a hard thing to avoid during the French Revolution, one might think.73 His fellow revolutionary Louis de Saint-Just described the ideal “revolutionary man” in terms that would have been acceptable to any Puritan: “inflexible, but sensible; he is frugal; he is simple … honorable, he is sober, but not mawkish.”74 Lenin inveighed against “slovenliness … carelessness, untidiness, unpunctuality” as well as “dissoluteness in sexual life,”75 seeing himself as a “manager” and “controller” as well as a leader.76 For men like Robespierre and Lenin, the central revolutionary rite was the meeting—experienced in a sitting position, requiring no form of participation other than an occasional speech, and conducted according to strict rules of procedure. Dancing, singing, trances—these could only be distractions from the weighty business at hand. "
― Barbara Ehrenreich , Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy
174
" According to critical thinkers like Zola and Illich, one of the functions of medical ritual is social control. Medical encounters occur across what is often a profound gap in social status: Despite the last few decades’ surge in immigrant and female doctors, the physician is likely to be an educated and affluent white male, and the interaction requires the patient to exhibit submissive behavior—to undress, for example, and be open to penetration of his or her bodily cavities. These are the same sorts of procedures that are normally undertaken by the criminal justice system, with its compulsive strip searches, and they are not intended to bolster the recipient’s self-esteem. Whether consciously or not, the physician and patient are enacting a ritual of domination and submission, much like the kowtowing required in the presence of a Chinese emperor. Some physicians, unsurprisingly, see "
― Barbara Ehrenreich , Natural Causes: An Epidemic of Wellness, the Certainty of Dying, and Killing Ourselves to Live Longer
177
" NK, or natural killer, cells, which, like macrophages, attack targets like microbes, do not always kill. A 2013 article reports that about half of the NK cells sit out the fight, leaving a minority of them to become what their human observers call serial killers. "
― Barbara Ehrenreich , Natural Causes: An Epidemic of Wellness, the Certainty of Dying, and Killing Ourselves to Live Longer