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.
You're not alone, you're not wrong, and you're not being "emotional" about it. I have to remind myself of this often.
I get eyerolls from my family when they get me started on this kind of stuff. It makes me feel like I'm crazy. I avoid talking about anything political these days. In some ways it's more isolating, but at least you avoid the conflict and frustration. After covid, a lot of friends and family really revealed themselves to be pretty self centered. It's hard to see people you thought highly of let you down.
I don't think there's any easy solutions to our struggle. I've kind of gone down a road of isolation and nihilism but of course that hasn't brought me much in the way of happiness. It's a bit cozy in a sense, like being in a warm cottage in the middle of a storm, but like you mentioned, it's a privileged way of living, and that cottage is built on the corpses of the global south.
I wish I could be more positive here, but things are fucking bleak. Yeah there are beacons of hope in East Asia and South America, but then with climate change, and the US gov't looking more likely to kill us all than allow itself to be eclipsed by China... Idk... The only comfort left is that privileged comfort of trying not to care until you are forced to.
Yeah, I guess I'm just disappointed at how vehemently family members I used to look up to for teaching me to seek out justice and be a good, empathetic person, now turn on me now that I am somewhat well read and informed on large scale systemic injustices and analyses of the roots of injustice, now they scream at me for being too emotional and caring too much about it. It has shown me just how limited the liberal mindset is, how tragically, despite being a family of third world immigrants, my family has completely bought into American exceptionalism and imperialism and western chauvinist propaganda.
It makes me wonder what did they really mean about "caring about injustice"? Did they mean for the sake of aesthetics, performatively recognizing that injustice exists? What they get mad at me for is my understanding (built through study of socialist theory) of the roots of these injustices.
And apparently I care too much, and yes I did start crying in indignation talking about how barbaric it is that companies are, as expected, choosing profits over vaccinating the periphery, and our government actively supports that. They're mad at me for not believing in electoralism and incremental change. I just asked WHO CAN I FUCKING VOTE FOR TO GET PEOPLE IN OUR MOTHER COUNTRY THE FUCKING VACCINE FORMULAS? They have no answer but getting mad at me for being a "conspiracy theorist" because I point out that our government is run by bourgeois interests. God it's just disappointing that family members I looked up to for their sense of justice turned out to be brainwashed democratic party liberals, and my mom said I was as bad as a Trump supporter (to liberals that is the ultimate trashing of your politics) and my mom thinks I'm brainwashed by Chinese propaganda and victim to MISINFORMATION holy fuck
I imagine as immigrants whose lives were probably made much better by moving to the US, it is hard for them to condemn the country that in their eyes helped them. There could also be pride / ego in the fact that they accomplished something very difficult. Immigrating to a new country, learning a new language, a new culture, and succeeding, is no small feat. It should be celebrated. I don't know if you' ve considered that perspective but it could help explain their attitude about things.
I've dealt with a lot of the same with my family. They generally agree a change in system would be a good thing, but in typical succdem fashion they champion this by... Supporting run of the mill Libs, sanctions on every country actually trying a change in system, etc. etc.
I think people get set in their ways after a certain age, and that's why revolutions and political / cultural changes are associated with the youth. It's sad to think that they won't come around, but I know they mean the best and at this point I'm fine leaving it at that.
Ah yeah that perspective makes a lot of sense. It is also well demonstrated by something my mom frequently says, that u should not "talk bad things" about corporation because that is ungrateful because they enabled our middle class lives.
As Marxists we know this is obviously some misplaced gratitude and really some hot air false consciousness, but I think it is indicative of the roots of their liberal mindsets; perhaps the struggles and hardships they lived through before immigrating to 🍔 were enough to pacify them into the white liberal PMC framework. Ironically it is me, their child who grew up in relative comfort and was spared from a fraction of their suffering in poverty, that is interested in working class politics. Am I just a hypocrite to be this way? I have been sheltered and protected by my parents luck to get professional tech jobs in 🍔, and despite that I am deeply disturbed by injustice I perceive and identify via the analytical tools of socialist theory.
You are not a hypocrite. Caring about oppression is not just for the most oppressed. None of us fully understand what we're missing out on by living in a society as depraved as this one.
Nor is it imperative that you relinquish any of your personal economic position. If you have a career path, that's something that will give you some power in life, and a little bit is better than none. You don't have power to fix the world, but you can be a part of the solution. That might mean a party, it might mean a union, it might mean a commune, it might mean a conservation group or mutual aid network, it might mean direct action. What it definitely means, at a basic level, is that anywhere that is the domain of sevenvases is a place where ethics are strong and where people are cared about.
I have had a lot of twists and turns in my life thus far, and I make considerably less than the median household income, but I still support multiple people, donate to organizations, and on top of that I am able to store up material wealth towards building alternatives to capitalism. You will have the ability to do all of the above but probably even better than I have.
Thank you.