SOME THOUGHTS AFTER MY 2ND SHOT
I got my 2nd vaccine shot near the end of July… and while I was trying to read 'The Red Deal - Indigenous Action To Save The Earth' during the wait period to make sure I didn't have an allergic reaction, I found myself distracted with the thought of how massively disappointing it is that so many North Americans are still acting like being asked to wear a mask or get a free vaccine during a global pandemic—which has killed millions worldwide and continues to be an overload of stress on our healthcare workers, one of whom is my ICU nurse sister in the shit show province of Alberta, with numbers on the rise again—is some kind of great oppression, all the while completely ignoring & never saying a word about the actual settler/colonial oppression that Canada & America was founded on and that is still going on today (and that you'd have to be willfully ignorant to not know about & see).
Yes, Big Pharma is a thing (so is Big Oil and Big Everything Controlled By The Rich & Powerful), but if your conspiracy starts and ends with refusing to wear masks & get vaccinated while sharing cherry-picked information that conveniently confirms that bias… what does that even do to fight against Big Anything? I'll tell you what it does: Big Nothing. It's all just an empty "nobody can tell me what to do" stance of privilege that spreads contradictive info with no attempt to actually look at or deal with the root of our problems (corporations profiting off of people getting sick being just one of many on the interconnected list). And you know how you know it's all B.S? Because when mask mandates get lifted or when quarantine restrictions get dropped, these people act like the fight is over. "Yay! No more oppression! (for me)"
Thinking about others (aka: empathy, compassion, solidarity) is not a conspiracy to fight, it's the key to solving our glaring problems (poverty, homelessness, climate change, pandemic, income inequality, etc). And I agree that you shouldn't feel "forced" to think about the well-being of others, but I think we might disagree about who is at fault for feeling "forced" & what it says about one's ego-centric selfishness to be feeling that way with everything that's going on.
Or, as George Costanza once said: “we’re living in a society!”
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A FEW DAYS LATER:
I mean, with EVERYTHING else going on in the world… THIS is the thing you're finally going to stand up against?! THIS is the thing you're going to rebel against?! THIS is the thing that’s going to get you to temporarily stop using your platform to exclusively post updates about your personal life/brand?! THIS is the thing?!
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A COUPLE WEEKS LATER:
Anyways, I’ve since found a less distracting headspace to finish reading ‘The Red Deal - Indigenous Action To Save Our Earth’ and I HIGHLY RECOMMEND you go seek it out too. ESPECIALLY if you are a non-indigenous person living in North America who hasn’t quite got to the realization that on top of all the bad stuff you see on the news (genocide, climate change, income inequality, etc), all that bad stuff is also being done on stolen/exploited land. And that’s something that needs to be addressed in North America in order to ever properly address all the other stuff, and The Red Deal does a great job of laying things out from a non-settler/colonizer perspective—which is the correct perspective we should all be looking at things from, otherwise we’re just continuing to be invasive species (Consumero Capitalismien) on this continent.
But for those who might not get around to actually making time for reading a full book—even though The Red Deal is a tight 150 pages of well-presented information & ideas, I am fully aware that my non-kid having life has a lot more pockets of ‘book reading’ time in it than others—I recently got in the habit of typing out all the parts I flag after I’m done reading a book (partly to better remember, partly to make myself less attached to lending out/giving away books I’ve already read), so I recently shared some of my fave excerpts on Instagram & you can either jump over there to check them out or just click on the thumb nails below:
And then go check if your local bookstore has any copies / can order any in if any of the above excerpts resonated with where your head is at / where you think your head should be.
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