Emily Rodríguez > Emily's Quotes

“Over the last generation, scholars have produced a bumper-crop of revealing social and economic histories of the regions teleconnected to ENSO's episodic disturbances. The thrust of this research has been to further demolish orientalist stereotypes of immutable poverty and overpopulation as the natural preconditions of the major nineteenth-century famines. There is persuasive evidence that peasants and farm laborers became dramatically more pregnable to natural disaster after 1850 as their local economies were violently incorporated into the world market. What colonial administrators and missionaries -- even sometimes creole elites, as in Brazil -- perceived as the persistence of ancient cycles of backwardness were typically modern structures of formal or informal imperialism.

From the perspective of political ecology, the vulnerability of tropical agriculturalists to extreme climate events after 1870 was magnified by simultaneous restructurings of household and village linkages to regional production systems, world commodity markets and the colonial (or dependent) state. "It is, of course, the constellation of these social relations," writes Watts, "which binds the households together and project them into the marketplace, that determines the precise form of the household vulnerability. It is also these same social relations that have failed to stimulate or have actually prevented the development of the productive forces that might have lessened this vulnerability." Indeed, new social relations of production, in tandem with the New Imperialism, "not only altered the extent of hunger in a statistical sense but changed its very etiology." Three points of articulation with larger socio-economic structures were especially decisive for rural subsistence in the late Victorian "proto-third world."

First, the forcible incorporation of smallholder production into commodity and financial circuits controlled from overseas tended to undermine traditional food security...

Second, the integration of millions of tropical cultivators into the world market during the late nineteenth century was accompanied by a dramatic deterioration in their terms of trade...

Third, formal and informal Victorian imperialism, backed up by the supernational automatism of the gold standard, confiscated local fiscal autonomy and impeded state-level developmental responses-especially investments in water conservancy and irrigation - that might have reduced vulnerability to climate shocks.”
― Mike Davis

“Self-harm OCD can come at you from multiple angles at the same time. It says that you will hurt yourself when you don't want to. But thinking about hurting yourself all day is likely to make you unhappy. It doesn't have to if you can view thoughts as meaningless objects of attention, but we're not born naturally adept at this. We're born to seek out threats to ourselves and eliminate them, perhaps even if the so-called threats are just our thoughts. Never forget how brave you are for living with OCD and trying to cope with someone in your head that keeps threatening to kill you.

This means that to be self-compassionate about self-harm obsessions, you have to start by understanding that this really just is hard. You may think of yourself as weak or foolish for worrying about your intrusive harm thoughts. Or maybe you think you're crazy or going to lose it. The truth is the opposite. You're not crazy. By recognizing how much of you there is to love, you simultaneously create an environment where your OCD is just OCD, your thoughts are just thoughts, and your ability to overcome your challenges is without limits. Interacting compassionately with your mind means talking to yourself as you would to a good friend. Teasing is allowed as long as it isn't mean-spirited. If you can use humor to relate to the darkest of thoughts, you can help yourself through the darkest of times.”
― Jon Hershfield, Overcoming Harm OCD: Mindfulness and CBT Tools for Coping with Unwanted Violent Thoughts

“Ginny told me that, like Dr. Wisner's patients, her problem was not so much that she had an urge to kill her grandchildren, but rather a fear that she might somehow lose control of her senses. She put it this way: "The fear is not that in my current state I could do these things, but that I might slip into a state where I could do it. Right now, when I am thinking about it, I know it won't happen. But still it festers, it festers and lingers, and it keeps beating on you and beating on - like it's the villain, the enemy, the monster, the demon - it's a faceless devil."

With my encouragement, Ginny told her husband about the thoughts. She was relieved that his reaction was "he just couldn't even believe what he was hearing - he knew I'd never do these things, they were just bad thoughts." When I asked Ginny why she thought he has so much faith in her, she replied, "Because he sees me with people daily. He said he fell in love with me because I am kind. For example, he reminded me of a time when we were together in a cabin, and I noticed a bee trapped behind a screen and I told him I didn't want the bee to die, so he spent the first hour of our first weekend together undoing the screen to free the bee. He asked me, does that sound like someone who would kill her grandchildren? He also reminded me that I am soft and warm and very loving, and he would never worry about me doing the awful things I was thinking of." Needless to say, Ginny was relieved by her husband's reaction, since she had feared he would think she was crazy.”
― Lee Baer, The Imp of the Mind: Exploring the Silent Epidemic of Obsessive Bad Thoughts

“When my first child was born, I thought it quite hilarious that within seconds of her arrival, she was placed before me on a tray and a doctor put a sharp pair of scissors in my hand. It was to cut the umbilical cord. I had an advantage over potential Harm OCD with my children, which is that I always knew full well that I would have intrusive violent thoughts about them. Because I always assumed I'd have thoughts of cutting, smothering, strangling, microwaving them, and so on, I never responded to any individual thought of that nature like it was particularly interesting. If anything, I welcomed such thoughts as useful reminders of why I became a therapist.”
― Jon Hershfield, Overcoming Harm OCD: Mindfulness and CBT Tools for Coping with Unwanted Violent Thoughts

“Being a parent is hard. It's way harder than people assume it will be before it happens to them. It causes stress, overstimulation, sleep-deprivation, and worst of all, the sense that people are watching to see how good you are at it and how good a person you are in general. It may seem as if people care about you more, focus on you more, now that you are responsible for children. And children will press your buttons and try to make you frustrated, because making you /anything/ is fascinating to them. But what your children can't understand yet is that if you have OCD and you're stressed, exhausted, frustrated and over-stimulated, your disorder flares up. And when your disorder flares up, it targets everything you care about the most and tries to bind it to a living nightmare.

This disorder can trick you into thinking you're the worst of the worst. But you are not the best or worst parent who ever lived. You are just a person with thoughts, feelings, and sensations. Remember, being self-compassionate mostly just means being honest. When you make a mindful statement about fearing harming your children, you are being honest about your experience. When you criticize yourself for having thoughts and for being afraid, you are essentially lying to yourself about what is evident. You have OCD. Commentary about how good a person you are is a distraction from the important work of keeping your OCD from commandeering your family. Similarly, it's important to remember that all healthy parents have "unhealthy" thoughts about their kids and have doubts about their abilities to raise them. They're supposed to. Treating yourself fairly and compassionately is the only rational way to navigate parenthood, with or without having OCD.”
― Jon Hershfield, Overcoming Harm OCD: Mindfulness and CBT Tools for Coping with Unwanted Violent Thoughts

“You're not crazy. I'm going to remind you of this throughout the book. "Crazy" is a nonsense word we use to put ourselves down when we don't like what we see in the mind. You have a common, diagnosable, treatable disorder.”
― Jon Hershfield, Overcoming Harm OCD: Mindfulness and CBT Tools for Coping with Unwanted Violent Thoughts

“When you have Harm OCD, it can often feel like you're repeatedly being accused of a terrible crime. OCD is your accuser, but it also acts like a high-powered defense attorney who says, "Look, I can get you a not-guilty plea, guaranteed. I'm going to get all the witnesses and all the evidence and bring it all up in your trial and if you stick with me, the jury will acquit you. 100%." You hear this and think, Great, let's do this. I know I'm not guilty. Let's make sure it's official. Then the OCD says, "Sure thing. By the way, I cost $1000/hour, I bill 24 hours a day, and the case will take a few years, maybe more. In the end, you'll get your not-guilty verdict, probably, but I should tell you, the long trial will decimate you and the verdict might not make that much of a difference. But never mind that, let's get to that evidence of your innocence."

An OCD therapist like me is no high-powered attorney. I'm more like a public defender and my advice is simple: Plead the fifth. In an American court, when you plead the fifth amendment to the U.S. constitution, you are saying that you will not answer a question that could incriminate you. In other words, no matter what OCD asks, just don't answer. You're probably thinking, "No, that makes me look really guilty." Then I explain, "If you don't take the bait and answer OCD's questions, this thing will go to mistrial in a week. No one will remember it. It might as well have been just a forgettable fluke." This approach is what it means to accept uncertainty, and it is indeed scary. It doesn't come with that shiny promise of complete vindication. But it also doesn't cost you a lifetime of obsessing. Accepting uncertainty about your violent thoughts means allowing the possibility that they could be true by not trying to prove otherwise.”
― Jon Hershfield, Overcoming Harm OCD: Mindfulness and CBT Tools for Coping with Unwanted Violent Thoughts

“Not only can you not predict the future, you can never be certain what your intentions were in the past. We only ever know what our intentions are right now in this exact moment.”
― Jon Hershfield, Overcoming Harm OCD: Mindfulness and CBT Tools for Coping with Unwanted Violent Thoughts

“Most people say "I'd do anything for my child," but the Harm OCD sufferer has to do more than just show up for the job. You have to show up to this amazing beautiful being even knowing that it aggravates your disorder. You have to do exposure to the darkest, most terrifying corners of the mind. You have to cope with extreme love, often reminding you of extreme fear. You have to tolerate the uncertainty that your child may have a short or painful life in order to maximize the possibility that she has a happy one. To love your children is to be vulnerable to them and to see their vulnerability. You have to risk being harmed and you have to risk harming in order to be close to anyone. OCD can make you think you're too crazy to deserve this closeness with a child. But you're not crazy. You got this.”
― Jon Hershfield, Overcoming Harm OCD: Mindfulness and CBT Tools for Coping with Unwanted Violent Thoughts

“The first thing to remember about...OCD is that the horrible and disgusting "abnormal" thoughts are actually totally normal. The problem has to do with how the thoughts are presented and how they are responded to, not with their existence or absence. The OCD mind is a wide open mind, highlighting extreme potentials in any given context. To cherish something is to also be aware of the horror of losing something that you cherish. In other words, as an OCD sufferer, you can't /not/ think about this stuff.”
― Jon Hershfield, Overcoming Harm OCD: Mindfulness and CBT Tools for Coping with Unwanted Violent Thoughts

“When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a communist.”
― Dom Helder Camara, Dom Helder Camara: Essential Writings

“In her somberly measured reflections, Reading the Holocaust, Inga Glendinnen ventures this opinion about the slaughter of innocents: "If we grant that 'Holocaust,' the total consumption of offerings by fire, is sinisterly appropriate for the murder of those millions who found their only graves in the air, it is equally appropriate for the victims of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Dresden." Without using her capitalization (which implies too complete an equation between the Shoah and other carnages), it is the burden of this book to show that imperial policies towards starving "subjects" were often the exact moral equivalents of bombs dropped from 18,000 feet. The contemporary photographs used in this book are thus intended as accusations, not illustrations.”
― Mike Davis

“In contrast to the rigidity and dogmatism of British land-and-revenue settlements, both the Moguls and Marathas flexibly tailored their rule to take account of the crucial ecological relationships and unpredictable climate fluctuations of the subcontinent's drought-prone regions. The Moguls had "laws of leather," wrote journalist Vaughan Nash during the famine of 1899, in contrast to the British "laws of iron." Moreover, traditional Indian elites, like the great Bengali zamindars, seldom shared Utilitarian obsessions with welfare cheating and labor discipline. "Requiring the poor to work for relief, a practice begun in 1866 in Bengal under the influence of the Victorian Poor Law, was in flat contradiction to the Bengali premise that food should be given ungrudgingly, as a father gives food to his children." Although the British insisted that they had rescued India from "timeless hunger," more than one official was jolted when Indian nationalists quoted from an 1878 study published in the prestigious Journal of the Statistical Society that contrasted thirty-one serious famines in 120 years of British rule against only seventeen recorded famines in the entire previous two millennia.

India and China, in other words, did not enter modern history as the helpless "lands of famine" so universally enshrined in the Western imagination. Certainly the intensity of the ENSO cycle in the late nineteenth century, perhaps only equaled on three or four other occasions in the last century, perhaps only equaled on three or four other occasions in the last millennium, most loom large in any explanation of the catastrophes of the 1870s and 1890s. But it is scarcely the only independent variable. Equal causal weight, or more, must be accorded to the growing social vulnerability to climate variability that became so evident in south Asia, north China, northeast Brazil and southern Africa in late Victorian times. As Michael Watts has eloquently argued in his history of the "silent violence" of drought-famine in colonial Nigeria: "Climate risk...is not given by nature but...by 'negotiated settlement' since each society has institutional, social, and technical means for coping with risk... Famines [thus] are social crises that represent the failures of particular economic and political systems”
― Mike Davis

“In addition to being at the losing end of the imperialism of free trade, the Indian and Chinese economies were also throttled by military expenditures and the gold standard. In the Victorian era, no other major countries were forced to devote such excessive portions of their national income to war. India, already saddled with a huge public debt that included reimbursing the stockholders of the East India Company and paying the costs of the 1857 revolt, also had to finance British military supremacy in Asia. In addition to incessant proxy warfare with Russia on the Afghan frontier, ordinary Indians also paid for such far-flung adventures of the Indian Army as the sacking of Beijing (1860), the invasion of Ethiopia (1868), the occupation of Egypt (1882), and the conquest of the Sudan (1896-98). As a result, military expenditures were never less than 25 percent (or 34 percent including police) of India's annual budget, and viceroys were constantly searching for creative ways to purloin monies for the army from other parts of the budget, even from the Famine Fund. Victorian England, on the other hand, never expended more than 3 percent of its net national product on its army and navy, a serendipitous situation that considerably diminished domestic tensions over imperialism.”
― Mike Davis

“Village economy in India, as elsewhere in monsoonal Asia, augmented crops and handicrafts with stores of free goods from common lands: dry grass for fodder, shrub grass for rope, wood and dung for fuel, dung, leaves and forest debris for fertilizer, clay for plastering houses, and, above all, clean water. All classes utilized these common property resources, but for poorer households they constituted the very margin of survival. In an outstanding study of a contemporary Gujarati village struggling with seasonality and drought, Martha Chen has shown how decisive nonmarket resources and entitlements remain for laborers and small farmers. "Standard definitions of work, worker and income," she writes, "do not capture how poor households generate livelihoods." In the village of Maatisar, (which she visited during the severe drought of 1985-87) fully 70 percent of the fuel and 55 percent of the fodder requirements of the poor are provided from free sources. The forest and pasture commons, which altogether generate thirty-five different useful products, "not only serve as a buffer against seasonal shortages, but also contribute to rural equity."

The British consolidated their rule in India by transferring control of these strategic resources from the village community to the state. "Among all the interventions into village society that nurtured the Anglo-Indian empire," David Ludden argues, "dividing public from private land stands out as the most important." Common lands - or "waste" in the symptomatic vocabulary of the Raj - were either transformed into taxable private property or state monopolies. Free goods, in consequence, became either commodities or contraband. Even cow dung was turned into a revenue source for Queen Victoria.”
― Mike Davis

“The decline of export competitiveness brutally pruned the foliage of the Nordeste's class structure. If successive southern-dominated governments assuaged the great northern oligarchs with regular political kickbacks (often in the guise of "drought aid"), more modest fazendeiros were left to the mercy of market forces. From about 1875, control over production began to pass into the hands of the owners (often foreign or foreign-born) of modernized usinas. "The capability of the usinas to handle a greater load of cane called for further monopolistic consolidation of land resources; in the wake of this process, small and middle landowners became uprooted." The fate of ex-slaves, of course, was unimaginably more difficult in an economic system that no longer required the same huge levies of labor-power. As the Nordeste's economy slumped into a coma, supernumerary labor was either pushed into the sertão's "black, barren fields of hunger" (Tavora) or induced to gamble with disease and exploitation in the rubber forests of Amazonas.

What did NOT happen in the last quarter of the nineteenth century was what neoclassical theory would have predicted as an automatic reflex: the emigration of northern labor to southeastern growth poles. Instead, beginning in the late Empire, national and local governments began to heavily subsidize mass immigration from Italy, Germany, and Portugal. Even the elites of the Nordeste fervidly embraced "Europeanization." An extraordinary example was Bahia during the terrible "Two Eights" drought-famine of 1888-89. While state authorities were roadblocking retirantes' route to the cities and forcibly interning them by the thousands in camps, they continued efforts to lure European immigrants with expensive subsidies (few were tempted).

Southeastern coffee planters, for their part, wanted only "white" overseas laborers after Emancipation, and soon made this federal policy in the new Republic (The racial preference was later amended to include Japanese as well as southern Europeans.) "Why were the coffee planters in the southeast more willing to finance immigration from Europe than from the northeast?" Leff believes that "part of the answer may have been the prevalent racial attitudes on the part of the coffee planters, which led them to prefer European to mulatto workers," while Deutsch points to "cultural biases on the part of Southeastern planters against native Brazilian workers."

Both underestimate racism as public policy. Gerald Greenfield has shown how Liberal discourse about drought and development in the late 1870s revolved around urban perceptions of the "dark, primitive world of the hinterland" and "retirante inferiority and aversion to labor." "To the extent that Brazil during the latter portion of the nineteenth century embraced the tenets of positivism, enlightenment notions of progress, and the concoction of scientific racism of thinkers like Buckle and Spencer, the backlanders became not merely curiosities from a bygone age, but detriments to the nation's progress. Evolving institutions of national culture, largely based in Rio and revealing marked influence from Western Europe and the United States, stressed the nation's greatest potential while lamenting the inadequacies, intellectual as well as moral, of much of the nation's population." The Brazilian Republic, moreover, was probably the first government anywhere explicitly committed to large-scale "positive Eugenics." Leading fin de siecle savants like the Bahian scientist Nina Rodrigues corroborated fears that "race mixing was responsible for all social deviance such as banditry, religious heresy, and the like." Whereas mass European immigration into the United States in the 1890s was conceived as simply providing human fuel for the economy, Brazil's elites also wanted to use immigration to radically transform the nation's racial physiognomy. They were obsessed with "de-Africanizing" and "whitening" Brazil.”
― Mike Davis