I'm not homesick, because I'm not a sentimental person. But from a practicality standpoint, this country sucks. I'm in the suburbs on the East coast and everything is a 30 minute drive away. I don't drive. Where I came from in Europe, everything could be reach by walking or cycling or taking a train or bus. Here, nothing is reachable unless you're willing to spend half of your day in a massive, expensive, gas-guzzling death machine. The neighbours out here are all boomers who do nothing but mow their lawns and watch CNN or Newsmax all day. I've never felt this level of capitalist alienation before, and I've always been an introvert. It's not only inconvenient here, but gaslighting because everyone else seems not to question this boring concrete hellscape. There is nothing to do or see; only hundreds of fast food restaurants and gas stations. There's a PSL branch downtown, but that's an hour away by bus and the bus stop is a 45 minute walk (I'm not exaggerating). I thought the capitalist society I moved from was bad, but this is so much worse. And this is the bastion of freedom and liberty I've heard so much about? I guess I'm free to eat cheetos and watch Fox but other than that it isn't very liberating. My partner is a yank and really doesn't notice or mind, but I feel like I'll go crazy here. It's just miles and miles of asphalt and paranoid gun owners. I hate it and don't really know what to do. The food in the US costs at least two or three times as much as where I immigrated from, and tastes like garbage (I'm talking about the 'fresh' stuff). Utility bills are also much higher. On every street is a church blasting some religious doctrine at me (Easter was a cringe-fest). How do the rest of you cope???
it's like living inside Invasion of the Body Snatchers but instead of pod people they're cultists for the mad god of capitalism
and if anybody manages to be effectively anticapitalist the rest of the superstructure points and does that weird scream
At least I'm not the only one who feels this way... I can't imagine what it would have been like to grow up here. Traumatising, and I say that as someone who already experienced childhood trauma.
There's a reason that John Carpenter had the aliens in They Live have a red, white, and blue skin-colour palette.
I just realized how well "stay woke" fits into this given that they clone/assimilate you when you sleep
it's really bizarre how much some reactionaries are afraid of a future of being a mechanical drone eating bug meat and living in a tiny room when the basic reality of that premise already exists. Wake up, go to work, go home, eat processed poison food, go to second job, go to sleep. We're already alienated drones, we're just temporarily not killed for complaining about it. Well we're not killed for complaining about it individually, getting organized and doing it well would quickly get us rounded up