loading . . . Adherence to societal norms as a form of acceptable self harm I have been struggling with feeling "okay". I talked a bit about my family's current struggle with the United States's human kidnapping program and how that's been on my mind for months now. It's drained thousands of dollars that flow into litigation processes or the State itself, dozens of hours and who knows how many tears from my eyes. People can only see the _person_ being kidnapped but individualism encourages us to stop there. A person is nothing without their people and those people are irrevocably harmed when harm is met with no repair. This process, in its more violent form, started for me in 2019 and led me travelling to Canada for the first time — the first time I left the United States. Since then, despite my casual distaste for how things go down within the nation, this brought home more of the things that I've only heard and read about into the light of my life. I am fortunate to make enough to insulate some of this damage to my family and extended kin but this is _not_ an easy task and it's more risky when I choose to engage in actions that can threaten my employment because of the current administration.
There is a huge luxury being a citizen of the United States. At no point do you wonder if you'll be removed from its embrace of protection[1]. You can run to its arms in any country in which they've planted their bases or embassy in hopes of help that transcend that of the one you're visiting. You perceive other regions — not intentionally — as inferior. The militia, with more than 4,000 bases around the globe, gives one the sense that, with enough importance, you will be _saved_. Of course, this privilege weakens the further away you are from the archetype of the classic and "native" American: that of a white man. The definition of "white" even gets stretched to include those who would be more ethnically ambiguous in other countries: like those of Turkey, South Africa (who are those of _European_ descent, mostly) and descendants of colonizers (and prisoners) in Australia. We're not _really_ native in the eyes of the state. We can vote, protest, sue and write but as long as the state remains to hold onto tenants that reinforce the cultural system of said division, all of this will be as revocable as the law permits. All of this is to say that if you're born in the United States, have no perspectives beyond the country[2], you won't be able to empathize with a lot — that's intentional.
It is _hard_ watching the bipartisan violence of state _and_ federal officers running around, kidnapping, brutalizing and otherwise trampling on the rights and bodies that we _thought_ we had control over. The concept of the _terrific boomerang_ is being made manifest and for those who've seen this deployed by proxy in their homes and warned of its return aren't feeling glee in being right but a sense of fear of the mechanisms being made more robust now that they've been given time (and support!) to implement them. The things I can hope folks — especially my tech industry peers — to consider is how we defend and support the companies that are overly eager to keep systems of violence up. If we can't identify them, we should look for people _who can_ — especially those who've been impacted by them. We should talk to them with the same eagerness and fervor we clamor around new Apple© macOS® or iOS® releases for our Congolese- and Chinese-built (but designed in Cupertino) devices. We should be more curious and expand (instead of buying) empathy for folks that we can't see[3]. **We should give just a bit of a fuck**.
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1. Recent events have changed this for some folks. However, Black Americans and non-white Americans have never been considered worthy citizens despite the strides they've made in name of the empire. ↩︎
2. This is the defacto state of most Americans. Americans do not have a sense of the impact the state exerts on other ones — like my home country, Haiti — and how it damages, if not completely removes, the concept and deployment of sovereignty for the sake of deifying American supremacy around the globe. In more explicit terms, it's a high school bully with a gun. And its parents run the school. ↩︎
3. One of the greatest exports of American capitalism, especially after the Vietnam invasion by America, was that of modern individualism. The notion that every person is not only a brand, but a business to be sold, traded and consumed. This required disconnection from community (unless the community was also a source of customers) and from one's empathic self (as empathy is not easily exchangeable in the social market). ↩︎
https://www.jacky.wtf/essays/2025/adhere-empire/
