Recently, the imperial United States welcomed South African migrants, specifically white South African farming migrants. Meanwhile, farmers in the United States are worried about losing their farms based on a loss of subsidies and “staff”–or as I call it, the slavery that everybody accepts because employers refuse to pay what it costs to eat. Rumors imply that the South African migrants will be taking over farms in the empire; the mainstream media has not reported on it. Then again, the mainstream media was late to the party on numerous international genocides, so who knows how this plan will unfold. My question is this: why would people be mad at South African migrants when they are doing the one thing white South Africans know how to do, which is take things from other people and expel non-white people from the premises? This is the part of history where people will finally learn that having “experience” is less relevant than understanding the “experience” one has cultivated.
In Austin, regulation was introduced to allow homeowners to build more dwellings on their properties, likely for the rise of short-term rentals so that wealthier people could generate “passive income.” West Austin was largely opposed to the initiative, and the opposition was truly interesting because in 1999, West Austin put a bullseye on East Austin by designating it as the “Desired Development Zone.” There was no empathy for the people who lost their homes, and the neighborhoods that were so emptied out that Austin voted to shut down and privatize multiple schools in East Austin. The same mayor that helped West Austin get rich from bulldozing the Black community was re-elected, and despite the efforts of the bullies who destroyed the tree canopy for most of East Austin, they were shocked that he came for them. When someone has experience letting people take from others, that does not mean that the bullies would be safe, even if they reelected the same monster twenty years after his first attacks on non-white communities.
One of the most irritating things to hear from people within the dominant narrative is how “surprised” they are with the environmental degradation that their behavior caused. Even though suburbs required highways, gas stations, and deforestation, people remained willfully ignorant about how wasteful that development style truly was. Millions of Black and Latinx communities–not to mention indigenous communities–repeatedly informed suburbanites of the damage, which is why suburbanites retaliated by maintaining segregation to avoid hearing any truth. Now that regulation from the Environmental Protection Agency is being dismantled and everyone will be forced to live in the waste they generate, there is “suddenly” a need for action. Legitimizing bad behavior that increased the risk of cancer and asthma for other families never made suburbs a good idea. However, suburbanites told themselves those lies to justify dominating BIPOCQ communities for decades–until the communities beautified the land, and suburbanites swarmed in like locusts to displace them.
Someone will do nothing, blame everyone else, and take anything they get their hands on as long as there are no consequences for their actions. Fake regulation is irrelevant, especially if it takes enormous sums of money and years of efforts to enforce, and can be overturned because “feelings.” Terrible people have been running rampant for centuries, allowing people without actual abilities to continue to leech off others, and instead of chastising the monsters and/or making an example of them, people made excuses. If nobody holds the feet of terrible people to the fire, they get really good at terrorizing everyone else. After all, they never had to do anything else, so they have a lot of experience behaving that way. Rather than glorify some mythological past “experiences,” people should be reexamining what they thought was so “great,” and the contempt of all the targets of the monstrosity should be their first clue.
The Ku Klux Klan has been in existence since Christmas Eve, 1865, and they have a lot of experience being violent bigots who make the lives of non-white people a living hell, especially when they have recognized power. For over a century, they infiltrated governments and changed language so that people could pretend that their motives were impossible to accomplish, until the current administration revived that motivation. Experience has been used as a weapon to alienate newcomers from spaces that desperately need new perspectives. Until people finally realize that doing something for a long time is not necessarily an implication of a job well done, the most evil deeds will be able to hide behind the veil of “experience.”
Chasing A Dying Empire 