[ENG] community erosion
We spent hours in traffic jams to work in depressing grey offices to come home to spend hours in front of a stream of never ending entertainment, designed to prevent you from actively thinking about your current situation, and the world at large. We then grab a smaller screen to find more distraction, while our collective outrage generates billions in profit for the richest people in the world. A constant stream of scary stories fuels angst for the other and community while induced polarisation leads to a society of distrust. We are afraid to share, to open our doors and hearts, and thus we put evermore cameras in and around our houses and cities. In a failed effort to generate a sense of safety and trust.
This all feeds into the false meritocratic narative. You get what you deserve, work harder to earn more. And if you are poor, it must be your own fault. Just pull yourself up by the bootstraps. It is utter bullshit. Read Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good?” by Michael J. Sandel for a great understanding of this awful idea.
People that believe in this myth are afraid of the other. Afraid to share a life with others. They complain about an unsafe community but are the same people who refuse to share, to contribute, to trust, to live with. That retreat into their own protected property, guarded with locks and cameras, and turn on a stream of horror-storries, broadcast 24/7 to fuel this delusion. Just simply must protect what is yours, because you falsely believe you deserve it, and everybody else is out to get you and yours.
These people will always refuse to invest in their community, for instance by paying taxes for a thriving library, or universal healthcare and childcare, to have good and free schools, for beautiful parks and sports area’s. Because they are afraid people might use those facilities that don’t deserve it, people that are not of the same color or have the same last name as them.
Their capitalist driven tendency to accumulate private property and a hatred towards anything that resembles socialist policies or ideas, stops all investment in an improved society. They live in barren suburbs or in concrete grey towers or loneliness. Their kids can’t safely go anywhere without supervision or personal control. There is no third space where you can just go to meet people and to work, read, study, life without the need to pay or rent. Just to exist in a thriving living community in the same neighbourhood or city, with others, with other ideas and cultures, to share and learn.
We are a community, you simply cannot exist outside of it, how hard you might try. Our shared love for life and the other will overcome hyper-individualism. Always.