The settler dream remains the same, 40 acres, a cleared lawn and no people around.
It is no shock that the number one complaint in our settler state by the proles is that they can no longer afford to own stolen land. Bribe us, they beg, we need our treats!
I feel uneasy when they speak of these dreams, even among my friends. I do not care to own a home, or land. I do not dream of being a landlord.
How can one possibly solve this issue? How does one change the hearts and minds of the settler? How do you make them see that the alternative - community, is better than material isolation? I do not know.
Call me reductive but I’m starting to think you genuinely can’t. It will need to die a slow and drawn-out death of ideology, if anything. Nothing else seems to be working, not even threats of annihilation on multiple vectors at scales beyond anything in living memory. Terrifying to grapple with.
If we can’t, then we’ve already failed. You mentioned climate change in your response, so you should know that U.S. imperialism is the biggest driving factor in it. And if you know about that, then you probably know that they’ve given us basically until 2030, at the very best, to keep the temperature of the planet from hitting 2 degrees Celsius. Because we’re already at 1.6 degrees Celsius in temperature rise. And I don’t know about you, man, but I don’t want to live in a world where the polar bears and the elephants and the tigers are all extinct, because we didn’t have the nuts to do what needed to be done. I mean, Lenin already told us what needs to be done, but every time we try to do that shit, well, see Fred Hampton… And so I’m just, I don’t know, maybe I’m the crazy one in Omelas.
I mean, we’re already at the point as a country where the murder of children is acceptable so long as those children meet certain qualifications, like, do they live in Gaza? Are they Muslim? Are they brown? If so, murder away. So we’re already at the place where human life has no intrinsic value.
What’s disturbing to me is I know this is only going to continue to get worse, and there is absolutely zero chance that things ever get better within my lifetime.
Every day, I go to the convenience store, and I get an energy drink, or maybe a pack of wraps if I got some weed. And you know what II see? every day, dozens of people. Sometimes they’ll be lined up, getting scratch-off tickets. You know what the odds on those scratch-off tickets are? Not very good. But they play anyway. So that should be our logic. The odds aren’t very good, but we gotta play anyway. Because you can’t fucking win if you don’t play.
How do you make them see that the alternative - community, is better than material isolation?
I think they’d need to see how community is elsewhere- outside the west- to understand. Because there are so many reasons why material isolation would be absolutely preferable over settler-colonial community to most people regardless of ideology.
Community, and society at large, can be an empowering thing, something that betters peoples’ lives. It can be a force for harmony and equality rather than racism, alienation, and all sorts of societal divisions. It can be a source of belonging, fulfillment, heritage and culture, etc. This is too often not the case, particularly in the settler-colonial neoliberal societies of the west.
Everything you said is valid, but within this society (and most) home ownership is stability. Rural home and land ownership in settler-colonial countries (or worse, landlordism) is another matter entirely, but home ownership is a metric that many communist and formerly communist countries, China included, are testaments to the importance of. And by “community”- well, there is community, but one has to seek out their own decent spaces here. The mainstream society here in Canada frankly, increasingly disgusts, horrifies, and terrifies me, especially as someone who is a racial minority and a communist. In such a environment, seeking to isolate oneself makes complete sense, though the preferable thing would of course be leaving altogether.
The settler dream remains the same, 40 acres, a cleared lawn and no people around.
It is no shock that the number one complaint in our settler state by the proles is that they can no longer afford to own stolen land. Bribe us, they beg, we need our treats!
I feel uneasy when they speak of these dreams, even among my friends. I do not care to own a home, or land. I do not dream of being a landlord.
How can one possibly solve this issue? How does one change the hearts and minds of the settler? How do you make them see that the alternative - community, is better than material isolation? I do not know.
Call me reductive but I’m starting to think you genuinely can’t. It will need to die a slow and drawn-out death of ideology, if anything. Nothing else seems to be working, not even threats of annihilation on multiple vectors at scales beyond anything in living memory. Terrifying to grapple with.
If we can’t, then we’ve already failed. You mentioned climate change in your response, so you should know that U.S. imperialism is the biggest driving factor in it. And if you know about that, then you probably know that they’ve given us basically until 2030, at the very best, to keep the temperature of the planet from hitting 2 degrees Celsius. Because we’re already at 1.6 degrees Celsius in temperature rise. And I don’t know about you, man, but I don’t want to live in a world where the polar bears and the elephants and the tigers are all extinct, because we didn’t have the nuts to do what needed to be done. I mean, Lenin already told us what needs to be done, but every time we try to do that shit, well, see Fred Hampton… And so I’m just, I don’t know, maybe I’m the crazy one in Omelas.
I mean, we’re already at the point as a country where the murder of children is acceptable so long as those children meet certain qualifications, like, do they live in Gaza? Are they Muslim? Are they brown? If so, murder away. So we’re already at the place where human life has no intrinsic value.
What’s disturbing to me is I know this is only going to continue to get worse, and there is absolutely zero chance that things ever get better within my lifetime.
Every day, I go to the convenience store, and I get an energy drink, or maybe a pack of wraps if I got some weed. And you know what II see? every day, dozens of people. Sometimes they’ll be lined up, getting scratch-off tickets. You know what the odds on those scratch-off tickets are? Not very good. But they play anyway. So that should be our logic. The odds aren’t very good, but we gotta play anyway. Because you can’t fucking win if you don’t play.
Century of humiliation
Long enough for future generations to forget what it means to be a settler
In the mean time carve out pockets of power with other non-settlers and do what we can wrt international solidarity.
I think they’d need to see how community is elsewhere- outside the west- to understand. Because there are so many reasons why material isolation would be absolutely preferable over settler-colonial community to most people regardless of ideology.
Community, and society at large, can be an empowering thing, something that betters peoples’ lives. It can be a force for harmony and equality rather than racism, alienation, and all sorts of societal divisions. It can be a source of belonging, fulfillment, heritage and culture, etc. This is too often not the case, particularly in the settler-colonial neoliberal societies of the west.
Everything you said is valid, but within this society (and most) home ownership is stability. Rural home and land ownership in settler-colonial countries (or worse, landlordism) is another matter entirely, but home ownership is a metric that many communist and formerly communist countries, China included, are testaments to the importance of. And by “community”- well, there is community, but one has to seek out their own decent spaces here. The mainstream society here in Canada frankly, increasingly disgusts, horrifies, and terrifies me, especially as someone who is a racial minority and a communist. In such a environment, seeking to isolate oneself makes complete sense, though the preferable thing would of course be leaving altogether.