When I got evicted from the house my family had lived in for four generations.
Seized with imminent domain and bulldozed after a year. The lot sat empty for another year until the entire block was eventually paved over and they literally built a fucking Walmart.
Turns out the public works project they seized our home for “fell through” so the land was sold off at a profit from what they paid.
They “purchased” our home for below market rate while claiming it was the actual value of the house. My family all live in different apartments now instead of the multi-generational home we had before it was stolen.
I’m never having kids and I’m happy this country is collapsing. I’ve kept the names of the public officials who approved that theft. I have plans for what I’ll do when Amerikkka goes full mad max.
Edit: got angry and fedposted a lil bit
Yeah, my family did its best to adapt, but my grandparents never really recovered from it.
That's horrendous. Imminent domain, yet another reason for why Amerikkka ought to burn.
In theory, imminent domain is great when used by a socialist government to build public works projects that benefit everyone.
Under a bourgeoisie government, it is used to justify theft.
Bingo. How the hell are you supposed to build trains without imminent domain? :traingang:
Yeah, for sure. I get the purpose of it and why it's needed for a functional state to maintain itself.
Unfortunately, that's the not the kind of country Amerikkka is.
Anecdotal but my (Chinese) friend was driving me through Beijing, and pointed to this MASSIVE housing complex, and said the farmers who were displaced were VERY well compensated. I don't have citations, but it's probably one of those stories that everyone who lives there knows about.
Yeah, perfect example. If my family has been compensated fairly, then we could have rebuilt our home some place new…
:deeper-sadness:
Eminent domain is the fucking devil, same shit almost happened to the small town my Uncle lived in (they wanted to try and build a fucking marina in a rinky dink river in WA in a former logging town and thereby increase property value, hole town damn near rioted).
Hurricane Katrina radicalized me to the left, and the Obama Presidency made me a communist.
Katrina was so bad my racist conservative grandfather turned against Bush and stopped voting entirely because he couldn't bring himself to vote for anything remotely left-leaning but he was done with the Republicans for the rest of his life. He was that kind of nefarious racist where he wasn't really openly racist, but he was privately racist, and had shitty opinions about minorities but was friends with some and considered them the exception. Real shitty stuff. When I heard that Malcolm X clip of him talking about the metaphorical "knife" in the backs of POC in the USA I instantly thought of him.
And still somehow he still had some humanity percolating inside his skull in his twilight hours to see what happened in New Orleans and actually blame the ones in charge.
I'm not saying this because its some kind of redemption act on his old ass. I'm saying that's how bad it was.
Not being middle class/being a minority
that's literally it
edit: honestly also seeing how my middle class peers weren't much better off due to having to actually pay for college so whatever wealth their parents had got cleaned out by college
Watching Obama chose not to bail out homeowners, but instead bailing out the banks, who then continued evicting homeowners.
The Obama administration more than anything else got me to realize the illusion of voting having any effect.
Yeah I mean obviously
But that was the most brazen demonstration of who the government really serves. If I remember correctly something like 85% of people were against the bailouts
I lost it years ago, but I used to have either a link or a copy of a Fox News segment during the leadup to the Iraq war. Before the news segment start a CGI eagle flies toward the camera. As the wings go up the fiery plume of two missiles launches from under its wings. As the eagle flies past the camera, zooming above the smoky trails of the missiles, the bird finishes the Animorphs-style transition into a fighter jet.
North Korean TV propaganda ain't got shit on what the USA was mainlining in 2002/2003.
Edit: I somehow found some shitty screencaps I did way back in the day. Turns out I got it backwards. Its a jet that shoots missiles and then turns into a screeching Eagle: https://imgur.com/m7ZgWLn
its hard to say. was it the neoliberals gutting the wheezing remnants of the new deal and great society? was it wasting the opportunity the end of the cold war represented? was it 8 years of "republican lite" governance by bill clinton? was it the undemocratic turn of the 2000 election? was it the response to 9/11 and the iraq war (part 2, electric boogaloo)? was it 8 years of do-nothing obama? was it 20+ years of doing nothing about climate change? was it the insistance of running a horribly unpopular candidate because it was "her turn?" was it the election of djt? was it the elite's kneecapping of bernie in 2020? was it the utter lack of a response to covid? was it the "everything is fine now" messaging from sleepy joe even though things are decidedly not fine?
and, looking back, i would have to say "yes."
Trump's election really rattled me and pushed me left hard, while also cracking my egg. As I transitioned my political ideology also moved further and further left through all the phases NeoLib->ProgressiveLib->SocDem->DemSoc->Anarchist*->ML. Even through all that though I guess I hadnt given up hope that some part of this thing that is "America" or "The USA," whatever I conceived of it as, had some "goodness" or was "salvageable" as a social construct.
The real moment I completely internalized exactly how evil the USA is was back in 2020 when the ruling class all got behind killing or maiming 2-3 million people with COVID in America alone. Like all the other stuff, the Iraq War, the droning, the coups, I could come up with some rationalization of how some part of this might not be completely evil. I think the democrats purposefully sending their voters out to vote in a primary during a massive pandemic just to stop a milktoast socdem was also really brutally eyeopening. But just blatantly saying "yes we need to murder 2-3 million of the most vulnerable to keep the stock market going" was really a breaking moment for me, I cried off and on for like a week just trying to come to terms with how many people are going to die.
Yeah I might be a bit dense and slow, but I am getting there. It's really really hard to fully shed some ideology that you have been force fed since birth, especially when your life is relatively comfortable.
*Not implying that Anarchists arent as committed as ML's here. Just that I really got into and agreed with Marxism and felt that a centralized party was a more effective strategy. This is entirely my subjective opinion and respect the hell out of principled anarchists of all stripes.
It was tough for me to put my finger on what was off about the cases for invading Afghanistan and Iraq. The rhetoric around fighting the Taliban or replacing Saddam seemed like good enough reasons, even if none of it really made sense as a response to 9/11, so it seemed kind of fishy. I'm not sure I even understand it fully now. The one thing that is clear is that the entire political establishment spent decades facilitating these wars, and all we have to show for it is a massive wealth transfer. I also now know that you can't say you're promoting democracy while at the same time bolstering the power of the richest people in the world.
In school at the time (in Western Civ class IIRC, lol) we watched this documentary on Saddam about how evil he was. It's the one where he walks around a table and like kills someone or cuts off their hand. I thought he was super evil, but I still knew the WMD thing was a lie. I marched to just let the inspectors finish their inspection. But they invaded before they could give an all-clear. Funny.
It was wild how many people saw it as a revenge response to 9/11.
Seeing the invasion of Iraq as revenge for 9/11 might seem dumb, but I was loudly informed by a coworker today that the covid pandemic was actually created by a partnership between China and Fauci to randomly kill Ameticans for some unspecified reason. My criteria for dumb has shifted. Fuck Fauci, of course, but for the shit he actually did/didn't do.
Lots of things but it was crystallizing when I realized with certainty that we (U.S.) will NEVER get healthcare, and the Dems have been “trying” for 50 years. What the Dem establishment did to Bernie 2020 (and the U.S. Covid response) ripped off the last remnants of illusion.
Soon after I realized the healthcare thing though, I realized that without socialism/communism that socialized medicine is just Dem-Succory that steals from the global south to subsidize “European socialism”
This wasn't the first, but the straw that broke the camel's back was when I worked with autistic/special needs children. I was severely underqualified (and in hindsite the entire portion of that industry is incredibly sus), and I felt like I was part of a scam that didn't provide necessary services for this child. They were poor immigrants and my company was the only one they could afford. (I never asked, but I was pretty sure it was state subsidized as well). That job was technically "health care" work and I realized that the pay-for-play healthcare system we have is mainly a tool to deny healthcare and keep better options exclusive to rich people. Not long before I realized that everything for profit was based on denying access to poor people and the US was just a facade to maintain that structure and nothing else.
Other things got me thinking earlier, but COVID. I read people's predictions that mass death would be normalized for the sake of corporations and the economy, and then saw it happen.
I admit I swallowed the jingoist pill in the early 2000s - to my credit, I was a child, and not particularly the most insightful one - but when everybody dropped the pretense that invading Iraq was under anything but made-up reasons around 2006 everything started to fall away but I still had some hope in the Democratic party. This, of course, was quickly crushed when my friends' families couldn't afford their mortgages after the 2008 crash and Obama refused to arrest any of the bankers who caused it.
Most people did so I wouldn't beat yourself up too much. I was the one dipshit in my school who wasn't all "Lets go kill em all!!!" and thought the invasion was a really stupid idea. Not because I was a good person or a leftist mind you, but because I was a big enough history nerd and war buff to know it was a really terrible choice for imperial expansion; there were so many better non while people to invade and kill.
I admit I swallowed the jingoist pill in the early 2000s - to my credit, I was a child, and not particularly the most insightful one
Yeah, I went through a "Why would anybody do this to America" phase, much like people around me. My age was a single digit at the time, but the adults had no fucking excuse.
For me, it didn't happen like that. I'm unsatisfied with explanations I don't understand, and I enjoy questioning endlessly if I don't get it. Just so happens, American culture is upheld by a veritable mountain of unquestioned assumptions and conventional wisdom, none of which hold up to even a little bit of scrutiny. I had a long conspiracy period phase looking for explanations that did satisfy, and you'd be amazed to learn that the ones that made sense and that I could follow the logic of were anti-capitalism and anti-imperialism, and later, more specifically, Marxism. For me it was a process that feels kind of inevitable in retrospect because I like running against the grain.
But also, it was when Bush did 9/11.
ya, there was a similar arc in my experience - it just really became apparent "how awful the US is" when Iraq WMDs narrative hype started up, and then seeing how none of the protesting and opposition stopped the invasion from happening
once I had that clear example of how fucked up the US foreign policy 'works', it verified so many of instances of similar shit throughout US history
I can't name a specific event, it's really just been a fluid process as I've learned more over the years. Historical racism, current racism, classism, imperialism, anti-democracy, etc. - just every thing I've learned shows how inherently and uniquely corrupt this country is.
Maybe something of a sizeable part was learning about how the US actually fervently prevents world governments from being influenced or controlled by democratic means, rather than stepping in to protect democracy as a principle, like ever. It's just an excuse they use to do the opposite.
Bolivian coup. I was already radicalized at that point but that event really shook any of the remaining succdem tendencies off. At the end of the day the only socialist project that matters is the one that survives and the safeguarding of those projects against the sincerely satanic United States by any means is completely justified. They ran over Evo's dog with a fucking tank man. Death to America :inshallah:
