Kicking it with some Steemians in real life, enjoying some minor flooding, and ponderings on oppression

Yesterday was the annual Harvest Festival at People's Co-op, the most wonderful little grocery store around :-) Every Wednesday, all year long, the co-op has a farmer's market, and once a year it triples in size and features all kinds of live music and other entertainment. It was so wonderful running into a bunch of people that I haven't seen in some time, as well as meeting @RichardCrill & LindseyLambz for the first time. Steemians in real life!! The above image is me with the two of them and my brother @Alchemage, and was taken by Hive account@thelynx, who hadn't joined Steemit at the time.

Later that evening, Portland got hit with its first good rain of the season, and because all the drains are clogged with leaves and such, many roads were turned into foot-deep, fast-moving streams. It made the journey across town to the Solsara intro/practice evening quite an interesting one, haha!

I ended up talking through a variety of swirling thoughts on today's walk, but much of it around oppression and the movements to end it. I see so much attention being focused on racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, et al. in the mainstream at the moment, and it seems like a lot of the conversation is quite ignorant of the underlying issues leading to those things. Personally, I see all of those issues as symptoms of a much broader, more widespread, and generally unnoticed by the masses disease: moral relativism & the illusion of authority.

Yes, it is a problem that racist cops are shooting unarmed "black" kids. I would say that the underlying problem of having a gang of thugs in uniforms who are allowed to (actually paid to) extort, kidnap, and kill people without repercussion is a bit more pressing. Without the magic of their badges, those guys are just pissed off racists, and face actual consequences if they commit violence based on their beliefs.

It seems to me that much of the focus on these issues in the public discourse is aimed by the few hundred folks who hold most of the wealth and have employed hundreds of thousands of these armed thugs to enforce their will, because divide & conquer is a very old and very effective tactic. If you can keep the masses attacking, judging, and oppressing each other based on things like skin color and shape of genitals, then the odds of them all getting together to remove the parasites feeding on the human race is pretty slim.

If we remove the institutional structures and cultural norms that allow for these humans to commit things that are unarguably wrong, if we remove the idea that some level of violence & oppression is a necessary evil, then going about healing & ending these specific forms of oppression & violence becomes a LOT simpler. There's a reason the US government offered native tribes rewards for the return of escaped slaves, and threats for the failure to do so, there's a reason that so much effort was put into keeping slaves ("black") & indentured servants ("white") from cooperating, there's a reason that the mainstream media & schooling systems try so hard to convince "white" kids that they should feel guilty for their skin color, and there's a reason that those same systems are trying to convince "black" kids that their oppression is the fault of that kid across the aisle with less melanin: because in truth the struggle is between a very small number who wish to control others through usury, government, and exploitation... and the other 7 billion of us.

From The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander:

The events in Jamestown were alarming to the planter elite, who were deeply fearful of the multiracial alliance of [indentured servants] and slaves. Word of Bacon’s Rebellion spread far and wide, and several more uprisings of a similar type followed. In an effort to protect their superior status and economic position, the planters shifted their strategy for maintaining dominance.