I feel as if I am drowning, or being crushed from all sides. I know I’m not alone in this feeling. The climate is volatile and furious; fires are ripping through dehydrated lands, oceans are becoming un-oxygenated and choking all life as it encroaches upon our shores, and people are increasingly being forced into deadly conflict with their increasingly authoritarian leaders. And don’t forget the Chinese concentration camps and America’s camps as well. It’s not that we are able to see more of the conflicts around the world, there really are more uprisings, conflicts, and tragedy. This is the death rattle of capitalism. Whether we chose to discard it’s corpse for something better, or waits around for fascism to sprout from it, like those ghost spiders
Pictured: fascism
It’s so much. It is mind numbingly much. Doing anything substantial seems about as easy as rock climbing with bacon grease instead of chalk. And none of this includes the individual tragedies we all carry. It’s understandable why people “drop out”. The American experiment, and possibly the human experiment, seems to be coming to a close.
It’s scary. It wouldn’t be a surprise to most people if a nuclear warhead was to be launched in the near future (or some other major instigator of war). Or a civil war, or food shortages, or long forgotten diseases emerging from thawing permafrost. But fuck, I don’t want to watch my comrades starve or dehydrate to death under an unceasing sun. I know that happens elsewhere already. But I don’t know if I have the grit to watch it play out in front of me.
I hope we can fight back against it all. We need to move fast and with purpose in our lives. But, what direction do we need to move in? In the United States it feels as if the left has been hampered for so long and brutally repressed. Even if not for infighting, the threat of police unafraid to use live ammunition (or “less lethal” in a lethal manner) on dissidents in modern memory, is a decent deterrent to dissent. In a way it forces our activism into the capillaries versus mainlining it right into an artery (there’s a metaphor here about the pipeline protests but I cannot chase that right now). But if there’s enough blockages in a capillary, the artery suffers too.
So I guess just sabotage shit or whatever. Make it harder for the “arteries of capital” to keep this dying machine on life support.