A House Without Windows

It's 2021. Forget flying cars, where's our absolute-bare-minimum attempt to lift fellow humans out of the cycle of poverty, ignorance, and violence? Where's our awareness of our responsibility to ... oh, never mind. I can be so naïve sometimes.

This is a harrowing read. Painful, brutally shocking, overwhelming even. The artwork is effective, the text powerful without being preachy, recognizing complex nuances without crude fingerpointing. The entire system is so fundamentally broken that it would be easy to fall into despair, and, OK, I'll confess to having done so in a few places. But the book is much more than that. It's not doom & gloom, and it certainly doesn't end on a Note Of Hope, the authors simply present what feels like a responsible honest picture of a situation you and I have not been aware of.

As for my initial question: there's MSF. Every year I grow more awed by their work. Even if it's an embodiment of the “saved THAT one!” starfish gag, even when I rage because the lever principle so clearly suggests that a nudge here (education, outreach, food distribution, listening) would be so much more fruitful than scattered efforts there, sometimes there's just no way to make those nudges. Props to MSF and others for their work, to Ellison and Kassaï for shedding their light.