politics

Jesus what a terrible thing to happen to a loving being.

What the hell is wrong with our world? I'm in Canada and I have to swallow a lot of guilt every time I have to buy vegetables or produce from outside my country. I also feel bad even buying vegetables from my own country because I know what we do and how we produce the majority of our food here. I live in northern Ontario where we can't really grow our own food in abundance. We get most of our vegetables from the warmer part of the province in southern Ontario. I have family and friends down there in a region called Norfolk and in the summer if you drive around the country roads around there, it is filled with migrant workers walking to and from work. They are from the Dominican Republic, Mexico, Haiti, Jamaica and over the past few years even African. They are paid nothing, given nothing, made to work like dogs and then told to leave when the growing season is over. We use slave or semi-slave or indentured labour so that we can buy and eat cheap food.

It's reasons like this that I go out of my way as often as I can to buy local produce from a farmer I know and can talk to and can see where the food came from and how it was harvested, collected and brought to me. But in a land of ice and snow, it's not always easy to find ethical sources of food.

It's really difficult to say that we have evolved or developed into a modern higher civilization. We behave the same way we did thousands of years ago .... we just do it faster, more abundantly, more efficiently and with billions of people.

That's exactly what I'm expecting. They'll just make a whole lotta new things illegal and jailable then apply the laws in a specific way such that only "particular peoples" are incarcerated and used as prison slaves. We saw this in post-Reconstruction South, during Jim Crow, and over the course of the War on Drugs. My favorite was suddenly people just standing on sidewalks being arrested, charged, and convicted as vagrants then being forced to do legally allowed slave labor for the state under threat of punishment (beatings, torture, solitary confinement). America said "We're banning slavery (except for this one case)" then immediately said "Let's increase the number of people who can be exceptions." This is a re-run. Or better yet, a remake of an old movie or show.

I'm fleeing Texas in the next couple of months because of this and possibly getting caught up in mass deportations even though I'm a citizen. I'm Hispanic, my wife is white. I'm leaving my wife behind because she doesn't want to go. All I can think is 'Thank goodness we don't have kids.' I'm so lucky I've got friends and family in freedom loving states and I feel for those who don't.