BLU_Raze
This might sound awful, or maybe not, but have you ever seen a white American that didn’t really have any awareness of their whiteness? Like, they had one or two good friends that were black while growing up and took the time to study Malcom X and MLK as they got older, but they never really considered what it’s like to be considered different? No matter what, they just don’t have the ability to just live their life as a black person growing up in a low-income neighborhood, and they’re completey clueless about the situation, but they try to read about struggles out of curiosity with hopes that they can do something to help out a bit.
This is how it’s like when I compare myself to people in the LGBT community as a whole, and especially trans/nonbinary people. It’s just not who I am. I try to be well-intentioned when bringing this stuff up, but it’s just not based on an experience I actually had. Still, I support the rights movement more than the average person around where I live, just because I think it’s one of those things that benefits everyone. I have the belief that there’s been a lot of historical events that show people taking on the role of the gender opposing their assigned sex, and I think such a small minority actually need surgery to address that discrepency that it’s a non-issue to let these people live how they need to live. It’s pretty much harmless, cheap, and makes people feel better about themselves. It’s already rare enough to find someone who isn’t transphobic around my place, so it’s unheard of that someone like me would really care that much. The people around here who do, they usually just talk about how they voted for Biden, how drunk they got at pride, and how much they like insulting Trump in the privacy of their own homes. No offensive to them, but it’s about as performative as black people who cheered on Obama and laugh at racist comments about NBA players on Twitter. To educate myself, these people aren’t so reliable. They’re dismissive and just assume that if you aren’t LGBT (or black in the second case) that there’s nothing to worry about and that I should just keep my opinions to myself, as if it’s better to just let things be. Like I’m the bad guy for thinking Jay-Z and Caitlyn Jenner aren’t good examples of liberation, ignoring that I spend time finding actual non-capitalist and non-individualist solutions to struggles.
I have flipped through the first book and will be taking the time to actually read it, though, so I’m trying to catch up a little bit.
Haiti and Cuba also took very different paths. Many people would prefer to live a half-decent life with access to healthcare and higher education than live in a hyper-privatized country in the sphere of US-influence.
On the other hand, people will risk a lot to take a higher salary at any expense, like the Irish who moved to the US while being treated like shit, just because they had a much higher wage.
North Korea, for its awful geography, long history of natural disasters, and low % arable land, while being sanctioned, was immediately wrecked once the USSR dissolved and they had no one to save them. South Korea, a still-developing nation, received a lot of money from the US to bolster their country, much like Poland after the fall of the Warsaw Pact and Soviets. In addition, the US makes a massive profit off keeping countries like Poland and S. Korea in their influence, so higher wages and greater consumerism is encouraged, and easier to achieve, in a way that feels like consistent quality-of-life improvements.
I don’t deny that many people will risk everything to escape sanctions and to move into a country where they can make $300,000 annually, but that doesn’t make poor countries evil or anything. People get paid millions to flee North Korea, make it through solitary confinement in the South, and get a successful career in the US, like Yeonmi Park (okay, maybe not millions - that’s a gross over-exaggeration: https://www.nknews.org/2015/06/claims-n-korean-defector-earns-41k-per-speech-completely-incorrect/). However, the higher salary and higher standard of living comes at a massive cost to many countries in Latin America, Asia, and Africa.
The NYPD has more funding than North Korea’s entire military. Tell me how many people are going hungry or homeless in New York alone. The US has no excuse whatsoever for relying on slave labor, either. Oh, but thank god we have more than one fat person in New York, so the problem will be perfectly solved when another New Yorker gets fat.
Do some research for 5 seconds. The country has been at war for decades for no fault of their own. I don’t laugh when the US is sending billions of dollars of military equipment when I see dozens of new homeless people every day. It’s just not funny. Military expenses are irrelevant, anyway. Feeding people could be done with or without spending on military. The difference is that North Korea is under sactions when they have like 18% arable land.