Mushroom Zucchini Pasta

20220501 #breakfastdiary 424, 17°C/clear Heat olive oil in a pan and sauté garlic and chili pepper, then add mushrooms and the prettiest yellow zucchini in the world. Salt salt salt, pepper pepper A little butter, boiled pasta, and some pasta water go in for #mushroomzucchinipasta “The inability to think — to fail to imagine another person's situation and suffering — gives rise to an inability to speak and an inability to act.” So said Hannah Arendt. An impoverishment of thought comes from an impoverishment of experience. Experience isn't the only source of wisdom, but if your range of life is narrow, you don't even get the chance to earn that much. That's probably why a society and a politics that only envy and worship confident, lucky people — people who've never had to reckon with the experience of the marginalized — inevitably ends up as a wordy carnival with no real people in it. The irony that the more incompetent someone is, the more competent they can appear. True fairness doesn't come from 'a league of test scores among people just like themselves'; it starts, rather, from a sincere sense of regret over the biased starting lines and gaps in privilege created by nothing more than accidents of luck and misfortune — and this matters most for the very people who don't understand that. Park Seon-hwa, The More Incompetent You Are, the Easier It Is to Look Competent Long ago, a senior I'll call O.S., not long after I'd started college, told me I needed to think about the privileges that came with simply being a college student (I can't recall the exact phrase, but that was the gist). It was only much later that I realized just how many privileges I'd been enjoying as a college student, compared to peers who weren't. Maybe O.S., only 26 at the time, already understood that everything I had wasn't because I was so remarkable — it was simply an 'accident of luck.'