Excerpt from a YouTube video discussion reflecting on themes in the book We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed. The speaker contrasts the promise of political/economic power with the lived reality of poverty (symbolized by sandals made from old tires), and links human drives for agency and dominance to recurring violence.
There's a line late in the book about, like, he stand. There's some guy he meets, is standing in sandals made out of old tires that he cut up. And you're like, ah, like that's where we are. After all this violence and after all this looting, and after all of these Europeans have come in and taken all this money and, and all of the local pillaging and the political dynastic, what was it all about? You end up with the promise that you're going to have all of this power, and you end up walking around in sandals made out of old tires. So there's just like, a lot of pieces of it that are. Are so telling about our own nature, our own. Our own will for power, our own desire to have, to feel agency, to feel strong, and to resort to the most basic level of communication we have, which is violence.
