We will all have personal cops

Thoughts from the grocery store and other delights

Hi, hoping you are finding some joy in fighting for liberation wherever you are. On this week’s delight I share my thoughts about security guards at a grocery store, a poem about existence, and a video.

On security guards guarding rotten fruit (can we agree that safeway is terrible!!)

There were more security guards than people working at the register. The capitalists are forcing us to labor to buy the food, then forcing us to labor as our own cashiers for said groceries. Why am I not getting a discount on carrots if I have to check them out myself? Soon each and every one of us will be assigned our own personal cops, I told my husband as we loaded our items for survival on the conveyor belt.

Okay, maybe the cookies are not for survival, but sometimes you need a treat to get you through dystopia. I wish I had time to bake cookies. I wish I had time to freak out more about not being able to bake cookies. Instead I’m spending my time trying to get a job, panicking on the sofa, calling maintenance about all the broken things in our new apartment, reading the news, crying about all the people being kidnapped in the street, crying about all the people being murdered in Palestine, crying about the mother with the malnourished child in Sudan, thinking about the unhoused person who gave me a crocheted heart then hugged me because I gave them my attention.

The crotcheted heart

I wish I had the time to panic about little things like being so tired I often have to take multiple naps a day. My husband says it’s because of my iron deficiency but I think it’s because my soul is tired.

I’ve been slowly working my way through Saidiya Hartman’s Scenes of Subjection and her description of the enslaver and the enslaved relationship seem present today. We all know by now that the 13th Amendment didn’t, in fact, abolish slavery; it merely created a loophole for it. I would further argue that the 13th Amendment didn’t abolish slavery because we live in a slavocracy and capitalism depends on it.

When Saidiya describes how the enslaved are completely owned by their enslaver yet the relationship is characterized as consensual by the law, it reminds me of when we are forced to labor for corporations or risk death while being told it’s a choice. Of course my life is nowhere as subjugated as those viewed as chattel. I can quit a job without the immediate fear of being killed. I just have to immediately get another job or figure out a scam or whatever I need to do to access housing and food.

We all know we don’t have a choice but to hand over our existence to the middle management autocrats, yet we are told it’s a choice. It’s the paradox of the enslaved. I will reiterate, slavery is a spectrum. We are wage slaves and I can’t stop thinking about it every time I apply for a job.

Well maybe we don’t need assigned cops because some of us are already unpaid interns for the state. I think all of us are cops to some extent. We police ourselves. What do you call it when I go to a grocery store and I don’t steal everything? That’s self-policing. Sure I could get arrested, but this only happens because all of us police ourselves into believing we should pay for food. What if we all treated wholefoods like our personal pantry?

What if Palestine was free? What if we all had access to our homeland and could touch the soil. This can only happen in a world free of colonizers. This can only happen when Palestine is free. Palestine has shown us what happens when the capitalists view you as a hindrance to their complete consumption. If you don’t serve capital you die. You either die on the streets from hunger or you are bombed to death.