The Disrespected Undercard
Some Conclusions I Deem “Important” - feel free to disagree
I've been posting essays to Substack for about a year and have built up a readership of about 175 people. No one pays me and I prefer to keep it that way. Thank you for reading my essays. So far, about 30 readers per essay share in my thoughts and I feel so grateful for that.
Everyone in 21st century America needs and wants money. I get money from Social Security and a small retirement account. The same goes for my wife. These benefits were hard-earned and appear adequate for the time being to cover our cost of living. If that status changes I'll likely write about it. Wanting an ever increasing money supply is a human illness. I'll simply say that inadequacy comes in all shapes and only you know your real needs.
Education is a continuous human growth process that has nothing to do with attending classes. Life and Planet Earth are wonderful teachers. The writers on Substack have been eye openers for me. I've written about them extensively and have drawn several conclusions from their work. The most important fact I've learned from Substack writers is that we were all born into life by a process not of our own choosing. No child asks to be born. Children enter a family through their parents’ choice. Similar kinds of processes await us as adults. Our choices are restricted by life circumstances into which we were born. Capital and labor already exist. Industry already exists. We get some leeway to choose where and when we work; how we earn; how much we can spend; and where we might live. Even then, many people of color are even more bound by restrictions of racism they certainly never created. That particular hatred was around long before they were born. But it still harms them in more ways than I will ever be able to enumerate or understand. The question of how to permanently eradicate racism is a big one, to which I have no reliable answer. Mass murder isn't worthy of consideration. Education, laws, religion, and persuasion have all failed. Why? Because racism, or more specifically racial empire logic, is a systemic factor that reestablishes itself so long as any part of the underlying system remains functioning. And which system is that? In the immortal words of motorcycle gang leader Johnny Strabler (portrayed by Marlon Brando in the 1953 motion picture The Wild Ones) “Whaddya got?”
Capitalism immediately springs to mind because it demands perpetual growth in profit margins, market share, industry domination, and global influence. Communism never truly existed. The few nations that called themselves “Communist” were murderous tyranies that never created a “worker's paradise.” In my opinion, the only government structure that can “fade away” is one where the means of production haven't been privately owned for so many generations that industrial activity sustains by virtue of its own momentum. That has never happened before on Planet Earth.
The long-term outlook for Planet Earth suggests to me that national borders, ethnic disputes, environmental concerns, cultural and language differences all need to be resolved before patriarchy, capitalism, imperialism, and racial empire logic can be erradicated.