no. 599

I wondered... if the people who had moved the jobs, whoever those people had actually been, ever came back to the city now , even to just drive through. And I wondered, when they did, what kind of feelings they might have, how they would explain the situation to themselves in a way that left them feeling like good people. Profit fed the life we lived, I knew that and saw the necessity of it. But those people had made a god of profit, it seemed to me, and according to the rules of their religion, if it was profitable to close the factory and ship the jobs overseas, then it was morally right. In order to keep from feeling guilty, they had, I supposed, devised all sorts of ways of thinking about what they did and didn't do, all sorts of clever rationalizations. It occurred to me that, in a different arena, I might be in the habit of doing the same thing.

Roland Merullo, from Breakfast With Buddha