Monday, February 10, 2020

Your Hell, and Mine

One of the curses of life in an atomized, neoliberal society is a decay of solidarity: a failure to recognize the social and political connections that could bring us together and transform the system, if we could only see how close we are to being targeted as others have been.

Right now in Canada, First Nations territories are being invaded by a federal military force allied with corporate power, but these attacks on a sovereign people are hints of methods that could be used against the rest us, easily, as long as we fool ourselves with illusions of being protected by laws and public pressure -- the same laws being flouted by Trudeau and Horgan, the same public pressure that has not yet stopped these attacks.

Neoliberalism has fooled many people into thinking of themselves as consumers instead of citizens, as isolated economic units at work and play in a web of market transactions, not as human beings alive in communities and countries. This lie promotes a tendency to turn away, to see political brutality as a problem for "someone else." But if we turn away, if we pretend to be "above the fight," if we refuse to recognize the universality of human pain and the danger of corporate abuse, how could we expect other people to stand beside us when the cops break down OUR doors in the middle of the night?

Whether we like it or not, we are all stuck in the same hell. The least we could do is to lend a hand, because every human hand resembles ours.

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