the 'C' in capitalism stands for cruelty
That’s exactly the point. Capitalism is built on a race-based hierarchy and the foundation of white supremacy, yet it’s crucial to see how, time and again, some white people will even harm themselves or their own communities if it means inflicting pain on Black and brown folks.
This is about SNAP, but reflects something deeper —a pervasive need among white people to malign and “other” anyone they see as different, with whatever means are available.
Where does that motivation come from? That's not being facetious. That's a real question. I often wonder what it is about white supremacist ideology that is so rooted in hatred; to the extent they'd be willing to cannibalize themselves if it meant they could harm others?
It's a deep generational trauma, sure, but historically, what went wrong in the evolutionary blueprint of humans that led to this mindset? Why, despite all the knowledge, technology, abundance, and prosperity that we hold in our hands as a humanity up to this point, have we not been able to make great strides in bridging that divide? It is a divide.
These are fundamentally humanistic issues. We all share this planet and its resources, breathe the same air with our lungs, see the same sky with our eyes, and feel the same ground beneath our feet. Yet there are those so alienated from themselves and nature that they deny our shared reality. They fail to recognize their connection to others at the most basic level. We eat from the same troughs, we drink from the same wells.
If a person can look at their neighbor, near and far, and not see themselves in their struggle. That level of detachment is psychological. a kind of collective unwellness that results in widespread societal harm.
I believe that at the core is an inability, or refusal, to see oneself as part of the collective. This leads to the reckless belief that they do not believe their actions have consequences. And yet, we all suffer every day at their hands, their heinous acts, their inability to imagine a greater good that benefits all. They have such a high degree of delusion about themselves that they truly view themselves with god-like superiority, rather than seeing themselves through the lens of gods, as we all are as we create the world around us. That's deeply troubling behavior; vain and nihilistic, it harms us all. These people are not just mean; they are dangerously destructive.
The time has come for us to push back, and that resistance may need to be violent, but it must also be constructive action. And we need to use that energy to transmute the grief we feel deep in our bones. The grief that is leeching our mineral rites, and has eroded our ability to create, grow, subsist, and thrive.
The only solution the collective has is to build in the margins. Our path forward is to build communities at the margins, finding strength in the cracks of the failing capitalist system. Only in coming together, divesting from harmful systems, and actively building coalitions can we enact the change needed and show that instituting harm will not go unchallenged.