We hate private land owners, we hate the landlords, we hate the bankers, we hate the billionaires, we hate the warlords and warmongers. We hate the techbro chuds. We hate the corporate media. As we should. The hexbear community has solidified my conviction that all such people are downright anti-humans.
I live in Texas, and I am surrounded by people who see themselves as righteous, good people. Many of their ancestors were Germans, arriving after the middle of the 19th century, in the wake of the German Springtime of the Peoples revolutions of 1848.
I can't help but feel jealous -- of their history, heritage, etc. (Although, I suspect a lot of that history is fleeing from the dismantlement of structures supporting aristocracies.) At the risk of doxxing myself, I'm just a cracker whose ancestors were half dirt-poor farmers from Northern Sweden who immigrated to the American Midwest, got engineering degrees, enlisted in the military, and were lifelong union members and Democrats until the Evangelicals got their son (my father), and half upper middle class East Coasters.
I say all that because I don't have much of a heritage -- no interesting history. My family spent four generations toiling in this country, and the six contemporary families descended from those ancestors today have relatively little to show for their immigration and diaspora, insofar as I understand it.
But mostly I'm jealous of two things: 1) the support network of family and dozens of cousins who are all distantly related but all living in the same geographic area that several of my friends here have -- I only have my sister and her young family who live nearby to me; and 2) the land owned by these people.
Texas is a hell hole in many ways, but one of the worst ways is how little public land there is here. Just a smattering of state parks and wildlife preserves that are getting eroded by developers and petty legislators over the years. Everything else is barbed wire fenced-off apportions. Every acre accounted for, and protected by AR-15-wielding hunters, ranchers, rural suburbanites, and the county sheriff. And don't get me started on the folks with oil wells on their land.
Would I want to be those people? I would not. Knowing how settlers wound up pushing out indigenous peoples from their lands all over this continent, I would be ashamed of myself. And yet, their wealth and stability are things I yearn for, not just for myself and my family, but for all peoples in the world.
And I know, that stability at the price of exclusive "ownership" of land is a zero-sum game that inescapably forces others into lives of poverty and perpetual renting, if not downright slavery.
But there is no alternative in this ugly, greedy country. Especially not in Texas. These people will fight to the last drop of blood before they let go of their holdings and allowed a peoples' ownership of land like in Vietnam and China.
And why is this? A lot of it is racism -- ours for our "people", not for "their people". But a lot of it is just ingrained, unenlightened, childish, "mine" -- just the desire to have, which they would describe as just "human nature". And maybe also an impotent grasping onto the material world in the hopes of some form of legacy and escape from mortality.
There will never be any convincing any of these Texans that a communal sharing of the land would bring just as much if not more stability for their families and descendants as hoarding it. No matter how many of them are willing to share the fruits of their land and stability as "charity" to those who have less.
I'm not sure what I'm trying to get at here -- what is my question? I suppose maybe I'm asking, how can I square my desire for stability for my family and the idyllic fantasy of land of "our own" with my conviction that land should not belong to anyone except everyone all at once, and that the only purpose of the state should be to protect universal land ownership from those who would seek to return it to their exclusive hands?
I don't know, maybe that's the incorrect way to put that question.
