Stash

The sensational TV coverage continues. For some reason, I found something really sad in the pictures today of 40 tonelados of marijuana, and more guns than I could count. It was as if the dirty interior of Rio was exposed, just this squalid stash. It made me feel sad, because the worth of it was incalculable, especially when you include all the stolen bikes and cars the police found (do you like the way I'm not including any facts or numbers here?). But when you look at pictures of the place, and the poverty that people have been living in, nothing (other than the ostentatious homes of the traficantes) is of any value at all. I wonder what will bring any currency into the place now that its only source of wealth has been removed.

It's not the most obvious image to be moved by, but for some reason other than heat-induced fatigue, it did make me feel quite sad. In the same way that when someone dies, and you look at all their accumulated posessions, you wonder if that is all that a life amounts to. Of course a life amounts to a lot more than possessions - perhaps really the opposite of this - but they tell a story about how that person lived. With the glamour of power removed, it amounts to monotony, fear and squalor, and that makes me sad.