Sign of the times

Sometime since Friday night this rather large tent appeared on the sidewalk a block from the apartments where I live. Whoever lives here keeps a tidy camp and has thoughtfully attempted to leave room for pedestrians and people parking cars. More people are losing their housing every day, being forced to live in the streets. Rents are phenomenal and buying a house is completely out of reach of middle class people. How has it come to this?

Sue, her granddaughter Eliana, and I leave tomorrow for four days at the coast in the little house that Sue's father built with his own hands. It's in a "dead zone" for cell and internet reception, so I'll be quiet for a bit. See you on the other side.

Instead of commenting, here's something else you might enjoy reading, from the Hampton Institute: "Capitalism will ensure the destruction of our planet and all life on it. Is humanity to blame for this? Capitalism is, after all, a "man-made" system. But it's a system that has been created and maintained by a very small section of humanity, for their benefit and at the expense of the planet and the majority of humanity. 

Fact is, the global masses are held hostage by the oppressive forces of capital. Thus, our "participation" is coerced/forced. Do *the people* have agency in this scenario? Sure. But the only "choice" is worldwide revolution. And, as history has shown, that is much easier said than done, especially when capitalists have spent over a century constructing layers upon layers of protections: puppet dictatorships to subjugate colonized populations in the global South, vast systems of propaganda to obstruct class consciousness, bourgeois democracy to provide a false sense of empowerment via electoralism, and armed forces (domestic and abroad) that are capable of swift brutality on unprecedented scale. 

This is not easy to overcome. So, if you want to blame humanity, ok.. but please understand this is what we're up against."