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
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.