I've worked 13 hours straight and had to organize a push to get us fed dinner.
There's a good chance I'm stuck here for 2 more hours, meaning I get 0 time to do anything except sleep and do this again.
I want to quit so badly, but I'm basically forced to be here because this job market is such shit that it took a year to get this job. And I consider myself lucky to have this.
There's a thread on lemmygrad from someone that's also exhausted around the discourse about the American "left". Yes we suck, yes we are privileged compared to a lot of people, yes our organizing is tame and not effective, yes my material conditions mean I'm not doing adventurism and neither are my comrades.
BUT don't claim we're not trying. I know people working two jobs. I technically have 2 jobs and am maybe able to get back on my feet financially in a few months. We still do what we can and it's not enough but we're not at that point. Yeah that's privileged if you call being scared shitless of being homeless and being abused by literally every other human here...
I'm tired
Trust, as someone who has spent a lot of time working for local wages in the global south, there is still a big difference. Making $3 usd an hour in brutal heat for 15 hours a day 6-7 days a week with almost none of the luxury goods, recreational options or other comforts an average American has access to
a bunch of us don't have those either.
Eh, I live in the states now and do work with unhoused people and people in poverty and plenty still drink alcohol, eat treats, watch slop on their big TVs and smart phones, eat out and more. Of course some people don't but it's a marginal amount. I've literally watched football on a big screen TV in a tent in a homeless encampment in the US
i remember fox news being shocked that poor people had refrigerators
I think Jabril's point is that there are parts of the world where they do not (have access to luxury items, obviously literally refrigerators would be an extreme example to choose - yet it's still true for some).
I think it's not fair to compare what Jabril is saying to Fox News thinking homeless people shouldn't have refrigerators.
I used to live in a house with no windows, bug nets on beds to avoid mosquito illness, snakes coming and going as they please, no hot water, no refrigerator. Our daily pot of beans just sat on the stove and got turned back on in the morning to heat it up. The only meat was the scrap organs from a butcher friend every now and then. I knew people that only ate rice because the colonial destruction of local knowledge deprived people of the ability to even forage for food, they didn't even know what was growing naturally around them anymore and otherwise couldn't afford to buy groceries in general because international tourists fucked the local economy. I never heard people complaining, although the saddest part for me was that some of the younger generation hated their native language and Indigenous features because they blamed their Indigeneity on their conditions.
...I wish I knew what to say, but I don't. Thank you for sharing this. Humanity will never truly be free until we abolish the imperialist systems which maintain this inequality.
And these conditions weren't even bad compared to other places! Imagine being a miner in the congo, not to mention places suffering from war. When I think of my friends I mostly remember smiles and laughter.... To be in Syria, Palestine, Sudan, or so many other places is truly a hell that makes even what I say seem incredibly privileged
I think the fact that you have this perspective (that things could have been worse) certainly contrasts with some people in this thread seemingly insisting that there's no privilege to being born in the global north.
That's a good way to take someone's obvious stress at their situation and shit on it.
Is the comparison not invited by the discussion of privilege? Who else are they meant to be privileged over as an oppressed worker in the imperial core?
Falling all over myself to make sure you know how bad you don't have it.
Why are you being so aggressive and irony poisoned about this?
Yeah, I’d rather live my current life stressed up to the gills, in student loan debt that gets chipped away penny by penny, one catastrophe away from the kill line, spending 12 hours a day in an office managing a couple million in yearly budgets but able to have iPhone and car, compared to the poorest Indian who breaks their back 12 hours a day to live packed with 30 other people with no healthcare, no future, and no consumer goods.
I’d also rather be the same thing in China instead, working 12 hours a day in China in a similar position.
That doesn’t invalidate my struggle, but it’s also objectively the truth that one is worse than the other.
The left is cooked not because some of us are privileged, but in a supreme irony, because most of the left is so infantile they’d rather throw tantrums and shit on the chessboard and sentence half the left to death for the most basic discussions, or for eating meat, or for being religious, or for liking anime.
Every single day I look at what we’re up against and I see pure fucking psychopathic evil with unlimited money and unlimited guns and unlimited soldiers. Landlords that own a dozen properties, millionaires at the Ritz, oceanfront mansions, real estate corps. And I have to serve them with a smile on my face as a professional.
This is what we’re up against, and this is how we’re going to act?
Every day I am vindicated in simply giving money to China directly rather than supporting Western orgs with this kind of behavior.
Passive-aggressive dig against vegans on Hexbear? Must be a day ending in -y.
Why can't those fucking annoying vegans just shut up while I murder and abuse innocents all day every day? I'm a leftist btw
Yet, you did not mention the class we should oppress the most: Gamers.
No vulgar language here. G*mers, please.
China has a go fund me? You can just do that?
OP invited these kinds of replies by comparing his struggles to those of oppressed people in other countries. I don't think people would be jumping down his throat if it was just a vent post.
I totally understand where he is coming from and empathize with some of it. I even understand why he is making the comparison, feeling so much frustration over time will bubble up and spill out in irrational ways. But those thoughts are still ones that should be interrogated by the individual having them. It's not wrong to feel self pity sometimes, IMO, and it's not wrong to be frustrated about how we in the US are treated, it's just the comparison piece that needs to be worked on.
In 2010 the dumbest people you'll ever know were bringing up arguments about how men can't be more privileged than women because the queen of England has it a lot better than a bum on the streets. They were wrong because "privilege", as a term, means something specific.
I didn't say anything implying they should feel bad or that their feelings are invalid or anything of the sort, just saying that although one might not feel privileged in America, it is all relative and no American would trade with the equivalent level of workers from global South