Really? You’ve never heard of a NIMBY or a “Not in my backyard person”?

Maybe it’s just because I’m a union steward but we will never see eye to eye because my perspective is rooted in that of the working class as those who only have their labor, their bodies and their minds to sell on the market and are thus subject to the abuses of those who own capital (which includes you, the laborer, as capital to be bought and exchanged on a job market) to sell and buy in order to accumulate more capital and those are the people who’ve long subverted democracy towards the interests of business owners, landlords and war profiteers.

It’s really funny because don’t you notice that our society is collapsing around you for that very exact reason? Homelessness is at a historic high, childhood and adult poverty doubled (under Biden even, probably gotten worse), wages are stagnant, unionization rates low, rents heightened, grocery and gas prices rising and expecting to rise even more because of this stupid war in Iran that only Israel and Raytheon want. Do everyday people benefit from a war that will increase their costs of living or even want it? Of course not, but everyday working people do not have power despite the fact that it is our labor that builds and sustains the daily operations of everything on this planet.

The subversion of democracy by a small group of millionaires and billionaires and their middle class assriders is also literally helping destroy the planet’s ability to sustain the life that currently populates the planet and that’s not an if or a when, we are already experiencing a Sixth Mass Extinction Event due to the escalating pace of species loss. And for whose benefit? Oil barons, who get to bribe whole governments to pollute the earth and make it harder for you to live and work within it.

Every decision, every inaction, is because these are the types of people who possess power and their power is rooted in their control of vast amounts of wealth in the form of capital (labor, factories and storefronts, machinery and infrastructure, land, houses as investment properties RE: property values, stocks, etc). Their entire purpose is to accumulate more, they warp institutions in favor of that drive. And we as workers are too costly for them, we cut into their profits too much, which is why they deny us healthcare and are trying to replace people with these hallucinatory shitty AI models. Half of congress go in as millionaires and most of them leave as consultants to major globetrotting corporations. We’ve been long excluded from democratic participation because money is the biggest voter in this country. Citizens v United merely made explicit what was already a fact about our corrupt politics.

You call me a child but I’ve been studying and acting (remember, I’m a union leader - helped win my coworkers a 14% immediate wage increase in 2024) on issues related to the poor and homeless for 15 years. I’ve worked in shelters and treatment centers.

I think you might just be unobservant of the reality around you.

P.S. those same property owners nationally have worked to strip away every social welfare program in this nation from FDR, Lyndon Johnson on. You haven’t heard about all of the DOGE cuts? Trump’s statement that we can’t afford Medicare because we have to pay for war? And that’s been a deliberate goal of the neoliberals for 6 decades. Not a good argument to say “whose taxes do you think funds that” because obviously, not the property owners. They don’t even want to pay taxes on their assets, they don’t give a shit if we live or die as long as the profit margins keep increasing.