Martyr!

by Kaveh Akbar

you can live a whole life not doing any of that stuff and still avoid doing any good. That’s the whole crisis. The rot at the root of everything. The belief that goodness is built on a constructed absence, not-doing. That belief corrupts everything, has everyone with any power sitting on their hands.

“Every man who walks in here calls himself a painter, tells me about some Guernica he painted in high school art class. But you, with paint on your neck and a bottle of turpentine, say ‘I work in a restaurant.’ ”