habituated to short-and-sweet

There is something grotesque about reducing blood-curdling human tragedies into short-'n'-sweet observations and yet when the mind is confronted with what it can do little or nothing about, I suppose it's also understandable.

And even when something does not rise to the level of a "tragedy," the abbreviation process invariably kicks in: Nothing is really as simple as the 141 characters of Twitter.

When it comes to the abbreviation process, and when it comes to the human tragedy that shows itself in the mass migrations in the Middle East, my mind finds its rest-and-relaxation point in the words of the Somali security officer who once observed, in connection with the piracies off his country's shores:

If you do not share your wealth with us, we will share our poverty with you.

I cannot really do much for the wretchedness playing out in the miasma of poverty, wealth, hunger, sickness and all the rest of it. Sharing poverty strikes a note I can hear. It seems to fit, so I allow it to fit so that then I don't really have to think.

I don't feel smug about my fortune-cookie surrender. But I admit I feel somehow lighter ....

I guess laziness will do that for you.