First a background of events, but I'm not trying to transcript the discussion, I want to ask more about the aftermath. Read here my long winded self indulgent words

Today I was talking to my mom about the Murican response to covid, specifically omicron (we are south Asian immigrants living in 🍔).

I was talking about how it was utterly egregious how the government completely abdicated responsibility for handling the pandemic beyond just saying "we have a massive stash of vaccines we won't share, come get one."

Personally it makes me really angry at how there is no political will to share vaccine patents (in corporate controlled America), and my mom got mad at me and started spouting various liberal media talking points about how we just need to vote and vote harder to beg for incremental change, and Biden and the Democrats really want to help, they just can't, etc etc. And so I got really frustrated at this point and pointed out all the countries with functioning public health systems that handled the pandemic well, most notably China.

And at that point she lost her composure and started yelling at me about how China is a large and destructive imperialist country that wants to conquer territory and dominate the world, and I also lost my composure at just the sheer cruelty of the western corporate run economies sitting on piles of vaccines, you can believe so much in electoralism but who exactly can I :vote: for to share vaccine formulas and production, and I just got quite emotionally overwhelmed by this.

And my mom started telling me about how I was stupid for caring so much and being so emotionally affected by world problems that I can't change, and how I should disengage from reading and studying world current events because I was too emotionally invested in them.

So, the thing is, I think she might be partially right.

She's (and our family by extension) is a well compensated labor aristocrat and we live moderately comfortable lives in suburban America. And I'm finishing up a college degree that basically says "I deserve to stay in the middle class" that will let me get some pointless and soulcrushing corporate yuppie scum job to pay my bills. If we so choose, we do indeed have the privilege of ignoring the outside world and just hyperfocusing on individual career bullshit and our own family, we can just be "apolitical" and just grind for my own future middle class American life.

I get that my mom's view is very individualist; when can an individual ever "change anything" on political scales? Political power exists within organization only. And it seems like the conditions simply don't exist for me to be able to really change anything outside of helping a few people with the meager and comparatively tiny amount of capital I can accumulate from a life of PMC bullshit labor. I can make a few people's lives a little better, but I can't do anything about the barbaric system that dispossesses people and destroys lives.

I know I'm just a self centered petit bourgeois whiny piece of shit whining despite my life being privileged and comfortable that I'm isolated from the life or death day to day nature of politics beyond sympathy and solidarity. As immigrants to this barbaric country that puts its boot upon the global south, we happen to be near the top of the imperial pyramid and reap all these benefits coming from exploited and destroyed lives below us. I feel like I'm being told to just ignore this reality of what the world is, of our position within the world, privileged and isolated from the struggle. My mom yelled at me for not being able to get out of my mind just the awful nature and reality of where we're standing and whose backs we're standing on.

And from a mental health standpoint, yeah it's pragmatic, if you want to be somewhat happy or be a good family member in this depressing ass world. I don't know, when I think about all this, I just feel so directionless, I don't know what reason I have to just go along with this dumb crap of just grinding and working in some job where I will just be oiling some corporate gears on peddling addictive and exploitative technology to poor people, doing nothing actually meaningful for society besides helping some dumb company produce their branded widgets. I spend all this time studying (and the pursuit of knowledge is interesting) but I will be entering the workforce soon, then why am I doing this, who am I doing it for? Family? It is such a depressing and empty world, the number one and largest success of the western system is to just pacify us and relieve us of our ability to do anything but consume, consume meaningless entertainment, consume misery, consume toothless political show of elections, consume hope for socialist politics but with no meaningful organization or power to accomplish much of anything, living in a deeply reactionary place. I study Marxism because I want to understand how the world and economy really works, and I want justice and common prosperity and development for every human. Apparently that ends up being pathological? We live in a sick society in this western country but our mother country is much worse due to western economic imperialism.

What can I do, what should I care about? Am I supposed to just tune out of the happenings and causes of the world and just focus my life on one or two people I love? But what if they leave me, then I have no meaning here.

I hate nihilism, but I feel like I utterly lack power or agency and electoralism people hang on to because it gives them the illusion of having power and something greater than them but in murica they are being duped into endlessly :vote: for the black hole that is the democratic party.

Help, anyone feel similarly, any reflections, thoughts, responses? Scold me, rip me to shreds if you like for being a whiny fuck, sympathize with me, whatever, I just want to hear other people's thoughts.