MeowZedong

I had a shit week. Work is weighing me down, keeping my home together and my kids are weighing me down, I'm fucking broke, I've been gaining weight, my fucking skin has decided to embrace dermatitis as a way of life, I need a haircut I can't afford the time or money for, I rarely feel loved or appreciated regardless of whether I actually am, it's dark when I go to work and dark when I get home, I'm struggling with sleep and energy and am overcompensating with caffeine, it's cold, all the beautiful leaves are gone, my kitchen is a mess, and there is just no place that I want to be because it is all exhausting.

Saturday morning comes around and I go to my organization's monthly meeting. There's been a lot going on lately and we end up having back-to-back meetings with our chapter followed by a joint meeting with another chapter immediately after and this turns into 3 fucking hours of organizing meetings that passes through lunch without any breaks or food. It's all important stuff, but it's also very boring. I'm struggling to pay attention, I didn't sleep enough last night, and I'm hungry.

These meetings were like an extra day of work. I'm tired, but instead of feeling worn down, I feel invigorated! These meetings that would have been a blight upon my day had they happened at work instead turned out to be the highlight of my day. I feel encouraged, I feel appreciated, I feel loved, and I feel self actualized. All of this positivity is coming after I had to make a disappointing report: that we had not met our organizing goals and have a lot more work to do.

On its face, yesterday should have been just another shit day in what has felt like a constant stream of shit days for the last few months, but it wasn't. The responses to my bad news were focused on the future: how do we move forward, what must be done to improve, and celebrating the successes that we did have. Revolutionary optimism was with us! Yesterday was a good day and I attribute that feeling solely to my comrades, the community we've built within our organization, and the work we do within our wider community. We don't always agree on everything, but we share common goals, common values, mutual respect. We build each other up.

I just wanted to share this moment of brightness with you because life is hard and only feels like it is getting harder. It's easy to feel discouraged, particularly while organizing. It's hard and unglamorous work, but I think there is nothing better to lift us out of that darkness than the support of our communities.

Comrades, I hope some of the light that lifted me up this week shines on you soon too. Socialism is the way forward! Community is the way forward!

If you aren't involved with an organization where you live and you have the means to get involved, I encourage you to reach out and join one, even if it's not a perfect fit. Get involved! Build your community! It won't be easy, but it may just be the best thing you ever do for yourself.

This is purely a rant because I don't want to end up writing an effort post about this topic.

Every year, we see Westerners posting about the "Tiananmen Square Massacre" across social media. Their devotion to "fighting the oppressive Chinese government" is like fucking clockwork. It's so reliable that if you wanted to, you can prepare posts and comments to counter their narratives months before each June 4th. The western narrative has been debunked thoroughly even by Western sources.

But the point of this post isn't to complain about the twisting of events, but the glaring contradiction that is their relative (or absolute) lack of posts about events outside of China that were equally or even more brutal than they claim June 4th was.

Why is that?

Why aren't they posting as regularly about the genocide of indigenous people in their own countries? Why aren't they posting so frequently about the massacres in Jakarta? Why aren't they posting as regularly about the bombing of Nagasaki or Hiroshima or Nagasaki or Dresden or Yemen or Iraq of Afghanistan or Syria? Why aren't they posting each year about the famines Britain engineered in India and other countries? Why don't I see yearly posts about the Nanjing Massacre? That also occurred in China. Why don't I see the same reminders about the transatlantic slave trade?

The governments that perpetrated (and in some cases, continue) many of these atrocities still exist and are still oppressing the people who were targeted during these events. This is why they say they target China, right?

Hell, the Holocaust and the subsequent resurgence of facism sees less attention from Westerners than the June 4th incident these days.

The reason for this disparity is that these people don't actually give a shit whether the Chinese people are oppressed. When they say "I hate the Chinese government, but I don't hate the Chinese people," they don't give a shit whether the Chinese people support and continue to build their current government. It's not about supporting others, it's about asserting the dominance and righteousness of the Western world. Not only can they not empathize with those outside the West, they put immense effort into doing the opposite.

It's about convincing themselves that they live in a just society and that, despite how badly they are oppressed, they could always be worse off. It's racist, but that racism serves a purpose: it is the copium that keeps them convinced that it's ok to be oppressed by their own governments.

I don't rant because I expect the sinophobic propaganda to disappear. I rant because I'm tired of the racism. I rant because I'm tired of the ignorance. I rant because all I want is to see people show others a bit of empathy, to show a little skepticism when they are told others are evil, a little curiosity about the other's point of view, but I'm constantly disappointed.

Rant over. Thanks for listening.