"Why don't you want to come to my wedding?"
"I want to come but I can't afford a ticket overseas."
"Whatever, if you want to stay home and miss out on life that's your decision I guess."
Apparently me saying no to this wedding was the last straw for them, because they're always asking me to do things I can't afford and they don't seem to understand why I can't despite me telling them every time that I am poor. So now I'm the bad person because I'm totally being poor and "holding myself back" on purpose.
If they want to burn this bridge they can fuck right off. I've had enough of this shit.
Oh my fucking g dash d this TRIGGERED a memory of a coworker who was so fucking into their cars shininess and newness that they spent almost their entire salary on cars. Tiny apartment, new car every six months, bought not leased, would sell the old one. Like, there's neurodivergent and then there's my dude it is clear you have never had to have sleep for dinner.
You just dug up some very old painful memories of me doing just that once upon a time. I buried that well.
Thanks.
I'm in a much more comfortable place and I have plenty to eat now, but I may well be a leftist today because I didn't want anyone else to go through that.
I think it really is the empathy from that that makes us leftists. Or maybe that being leftists gives us the empathy in that situation. Either way it's all tied together. Then there are folks who come out of it and think "well nobody helped me and i survived so fuck you" and become
fascistslibsOne of the most fucked up things about
is that he watched his son die of cancer, and his take-away from that was telling people afterward that no one deserved a better outcome and he used that as a basis for blocking attempts to nationalize medicine.
I definitely attribute my leftism to my upbringing. My mom worked three jobs at times raising me and my siblings. The meager gov assistance we got helped us eat as kids. We still got our heat shut off in the winter, luckily we still had electricity, so all four of us slept in one bed in the room with a space heater.
When my wife and I were young and we were just starting out WIC and EITC let me finish school instead of working more than one full time job while going to school.
I worked so hard to make our lives better, but I have been lucky enough to have someone willing to help me in situations that could have been catastrophic.
So many people don't have that and that first catastrophe derails everything for them. It shouldn't have to boil down to luck. It hurts my heart to think of all the suffering we could avoid and all the good we're not getting because we let luck decide more than effort and innate ability.
Nobody asked to be born. Dignity, food, shelter, water, freedom, are all human rights.
I worked with a guy many years ago that bragged to everyone that he had the same kind of car as the general manager of the store and had one of those extremely sensitive car alarms installed. People made a game out of kicking his tires and watching him come running out of the store because he had a dongle that would alert him when it was going off.