(no subject)

[kingtycoon]

The thing is, I walk in the street. I walk in the street and give hostile looks to the cars that pull up menacingly. I walk in the street and the police have tried to talk to me about it. I don't talk to police - that's a thing I prefer about my life. I do what they say but I won't talk to the police & I usually spit if I see one. That's the way. So why do I walk in the street? Well - the sidewalks, even in my nice pedestrian neighborhood are all broken & uneven - that's when they're not covered in snow, which they are for six months of the year. It's the public street, people will imagine they're for cars, those people are just wrong, not just wrong factually, but wrong in their hearts.

Now, someone rolls up on you while you're walking in the street - it's as if they've pointed a gun at you. That's the truth, people might just casually kill you, and they might get away with it. I'm not at that point, yet, where I throw rocks at speeding cars. I'm thinking about getting there. I think about it a lot. What I'm saying is - fuck you if you go in cars. I went this way a few years ago and I won't go back, it's better. That's just facts.

But you know I could go and buy a car. I think about it. Sometimes pretty hard - because convenience, ease, the whole ugly worthless indecency of the contemporary world. I could stay warm, I could stay warm and go wherever I want... I think that the cold builds character, character derives from hardship, not ease. I don't mind a little hardship, or even a lot, come to think of it. But I could go wherever I want... And here I get angry - because I should be able to go wherever I want. I should but I can't, because in Ohio all the transportation dollars go to highways, cars.

So... It comes up, because it's weird, that I don't go in cars, why not? It's not just my native preference for severity, it's more than that. See, I think of my money, such as it is. I think about how I don't want an insurance company to have any of it. How I don't want a bank to have any of it. How I don't want a car company to have any of it and how I don't want an oil company to have any of it. Neither the rubber industry nor the gas station can have my money. I like it that way. I like not mindlessly - effortlessly, kind of even accidentally contributing to these forces. Because I hate them, because I don't want these powers to exist in the world.

Because of the colonization & conquest of other countries. You see. That's a big deal to me. Coercion, violence & terror, it turns out, are the main instruments of capital. If there is oil, an under-developed market - a resource that hasn't been plundered in its entirety, capital seems to find its way in & then make with the blood & slaughter. I sure don't like being a participant in that, so I do my level best not to be. See, I think of Iraq, the second to last war with them, that's the one that did it for me. Not because it went on for farcical, invented reasons, you understand - not that - but because of the arrogance in the violent posture. See - in history, historically, you fight a war to achieve an aim, a stated aim. And when the war is over you have to make accommodations with the leadership of the opposition. You have to do that because if you don't, then you're at war forever - and that's the worst outcome. But we didn't feel that way. We escalated to ultraviolence, turning it to 11 on day one of the war and then it just continued and continues - now everywhere. And by everywhere - I mean every place.

The thing is, it turns out that this idea that overwhelming violence would just win, that people would give restive a rest and become compliant citizens of the empire - it's not just a bad idea on the moral front but on the tactical front. In Iraq & Afghanistan - and now in Missouri the US is showing the limits of its capacity for terrible violence, and we are seeing that the violence that the state will muster against the weak & colonized is not sufficient to overwhelm them. That rebellion will go inadequately answered - that the monolithic force in the West is not sufficient to hold down all its victims all at once.

It's not a comfort, heck, it's just one of the things that's keeping me from sleeping tonight, but I think about the wickedness of the state, of all nations and how it is given its best expression in a gun & a uniform, and I see that the lockstep contrition, the bowing veneration of these jailers is being questioned, is being outright denied. I get a bit of comfort from it, but not much. I walk in the street because that's what it's for. And fuck you if you think I should go on the sidewalk.

Comments

[rasa.livejournal.com]

This is crazy, like right after reading this, I incidentally while cleaning email folders (as in, I wasn't thinking about what you wrote/looking for this email) found a years old email from my ex-husband about his objection to cell phones. When I moved to Canada to live with him I didn't have one and it freaked me the fuck out, I was a stranger in a strange land without my safety net and he objected to them because, among other things: "I like not mindlessly - effortlessly, kind of even accidentally contributing to these forces." He didn't say those words but colonialism, etc. featured heavily in his objection. I don't disagree, mind, but I care more about my comfort than those things, which is a big reason he's my ex-husband. Funny, I've never "met" anyone else who thinks the same way. I'm glad you do, because it's a good way to think.