" shared pain is central to what it means to be a human being,” but we are a society that values the anesthetic over pain. We hide our prisons, our sick, our mad, and our poor; we expend colossal resources to live in padded, temperature-controlled environments that make few demands on our bodies or our minds. We come up with elaborate means of not knowing about the suffering of others and of blaming them when we do. "

― Deborah Blum , The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2014