Nobodies

Excerpts from Paul Farmer's Book "Pathologies of Power"

Nobodies

Fleas dream of buying themselves a dog, and nobodies dream of escaping poverty: that one magical day good luck will suddenly rain down on them - will rain down in buckets. But good luck doesn't rain down yesterday, today, tomorrow, or ever. Good luck doesn't even fall in a fine drizzle, no matter how hard the nobodies summon it, even if their left hand is tickling, or if they begin the new day with their right foot, or start the new year with a change of brooms.

The nobodies: nobody's children, owners of nothing. The nobodies: the no ones, the nobodies, running like rabbits, dying through life, screwed every which way.

Who are not, but could be.
Who don't speak languages, but dialects.
Who don't have religions, but superstitions.
Who don't create art, but handicrafts.
Who don't have culture, but folklore.
Who are not human beings, but human resources.
Who do not have faces, but arms.
Who do not have names, but numbers.
Who do not appear in the history of the world, but in the police blotter of the local paper.
The nobodies, who are not worth the bullet that kills them.

-Eduardo Galeano

"The people in a number of the stories are of the kind that many writers have recently got in the habit of referring to as 'the little people'. I regard this phrase as patronizing and repulsive. There are no little people in this book. They are as big as you are, whoever you are."

-Joseph Mitchell

"The most basic right, the right to survive, is trampled in an age of great affluence."

-Paul Farmer

"When it is genuine, when it is born of the need to speak, no one can stop the human voice. When denied a mouth, it speaks with the hands or the eyes, or the pores, or anything at all. Because every single one of us has something to say to the others, something that sseserves to be celebrated or forgiven by others."

-Eduardo Galeano