It comes to me, in a surge of revolutionary insight, that our lives — meaning whatever it is that continues to happen when the TV is off and even when the power has failed — are richer and vastly more curious than anything we will find in the flickering realm of image and spectacle. That even those of us who will never be subjects for docudramas, who will never invent ingenious new ways of killing our family members and getting rid of the bodies — yes, even we who can never hope to enter the realm of image but who remain day after day in the nonvirtual world of tactile sensation — we also matter. We are, or are entitled to be, the heroes of at least our own lives. And that may be the most empowering and subversive insight available in this pre-millennial, postmodern era.
— Barbara Ehrenreich, The Snarling Citizen