You don't have to be perfect

You just have to destroy capitalism

Hiii, I’m getting a hysterectomy today so I won’t be writing here until the end of the month. I wanted to share my thoughts about perfection before I go on my forced break.

Thoughts that made me tell you no one is perfect

I’ve been thinking about perfection a lot lately. Then I got really high last night and I was cutting tomatoes and it got me thinking a lot more about the expectations of perfection in our society. We live in a society where the state and all institutes that preside over us reinforce the notion that you must be perfect to deserve to live. 

Our autocrats define perfection as following the law of the land, it doesn’t matter whether the law is moral or not. Protest genocide, you get expelled from school and you career aspirations are lost. Monetarily support genocide? You are president of the United States and you deserve another election. 

To be perfect you must have a mechanism to acquire income in order to pay for your existence. For most of us this means wage slavery. Doing things that we don’t want to do and daydreaming of the time when we can tell our boss to fuck off. For a very small minority of people this means pretending to be poor in Bushwick so they can gain clout while disappearing in the summer to go to their parents' beach house. 

Perfection means being in the ingroup that is white, cis, and hetero. If you are none of those things you can get partial admission to this group if you prove that you share the same aspirations and can serve white supremacy. See Rihanna.

Of course even within the ingroup there is a hierarchy. There are also caveats. To be in the ingroup you must not fight against fascism. Nope, you must eat it for breakfast, lunch, and dinner and ask for more please. See no protesting for genocide. 

The idea of being perfect to deserve care is ingrained in us from the moment we are born. Where we are born, where we live, where we go to school, the streets we walk on. If you are not perfect, you don’t even deserve to have trees in your neighborhood. Nope, no tree hugging for you. You can fry eggs on the sidewalk. 

When we go to school we are taught that it’s okay if we weren’t born perfect. This is the land of equality as long as you can make straight As and get your white teachers to believe you are gifted, you might be close enough to perfect to deserve brunch with the girlies on Sunday. 

Most of us believe these ideas of perfection. That’s why when we are confronted by the idea that we are not perfect, we lash out. I hate to break it to you, none of us are perfect, not even me! I know, shocking. I was shocked too. I’m a vegan anarchist. How can I not be perfect?  

I’ve observed it in myself and others that when we are told something we are doing is not right or our thoughts might be wrong we feel uncomfortable. I think this is what happens to some people when I say I’m a vegan. I know some of you will stop reading this now because fuck vegans, right! Excuse my indulgence. Like I said, I’m not perfect.

My point is that we’ve embodied the notion that one must be perfect to deserve care that it can prevent us from growing. Prevent us from doing the revolutionary work that needs to be done which a lot of times is internal. This will require us to accept that we still harbor some class aspirations, racism, fatphobia, [insert capitalist programming here]. All the capitalist programming that has told us we need to harbor to be perfect, hence be deserving of a nice day at the beach.

To rid ourselves of capitalism, we must eschew what capitalism has told us we need to possess to be perfect in order to be worthy of living. If we rid ourselves of the programming, capitalism will no longer view us as people worthy of living. This means to rid ourselves of capitalism we will be imperfect under capitalism and less safe.

It’s scary stuff! Very fucking scary! Especially for someone who used to be terrified about making an A-. However, there are people who are living in danger every day. People who are being murdered because they don’t meet capitalism’s definition of perfect. So we need to fight a system that requires perfection to live. Not for them but for us. When we fight for a free Palestine, a free Congo, a Free Sudan. We don’t fight only for them. We fight for us. 

We fight for a world that says everyone is deserving of love and care. We fight for a world without capitalism, white supremacy, settler colonialism.We fight for a world where everyone can have brunch with the girlies. 

I was scared to write my thoughts because I was afraid that I might say the wrong things. I know, I know, how can someone who yells at the police be afraid? I’m afraid all the time and being afraid is normal in a world where our existence is constantly threatened. However, I’m writing this as the first step to give myself permission to be wrong and have everyone see it. 

I don’t think I’m wrong though. Which is what someone who thinks they're perfect would say. 

See you on the other side.

❤️

Your favorite anarchist comedian/poet/social critic,

Marcela