Social conscience and engagement are healthy reactions to an unhealthy world. But what happens when outrage turns into despair?
There has always been a strange duality in society's reactions to the erratic (or outright self-destructive) suffering of artists, activists, truth-tellers, and cultural creatives. For the likes of Richard Pryor, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Hunter S. Thompson, or Spalding Gray, there is almost an expectation that to be good at what you do, you have to be a bit twisted, strange, maybe even bent on personal implosion. ...