If you can go to a fucking walmart and buy orange juice for a single dollar, KNOW this was only possible because of the exploitation of the global south.
Your life might suck in the US. You might be rightfully fearful for your life. You go out and buy coffee with a quality that about 90% of the brazilian population, one of the largest producers of coffee in the world, will never have access to.
But you're american. Your life sucks already, so you want to make it easier a bit for yourself. The only way you know how is via consumption. You buy a nespresso capsule. You don't have drinkable tap water (like 90% of the world), so you buy bottled water (unlike 90% of the world who, at the very best, has a water filter. because who the fuck can afford that much bottled water). You use your mad max gas guzzling machine to drive your single self to get water and nespresso capsules at your walmart.
In the 30 minutes it took for you to go to walmart and come back, you have:
used coffee grown in global south countries, in most cases in terribly degrading conditions akin to slavery;
dropped more trash than an average family of 4 in the global south;
used more gas than an average family of 4 will use in a MONTH in the global south.
but you're american. your life sucks. you have a hole inside of you, made by the complete absence of a sense of community and belonging, you only know how to fill with consumption. the only way you know you belong to a social group is by consuming the same things they do. so you go to shein. you spend your money on shein hauls. you can't afford a house anyways, no point in saving. those clothes were made in sweatshops in the global south. they last for a single use and fall apart. you throw them out. they end up in a dumpster by the sea. in the global south. to eat, people in the global south go through your trash to find enough shit to sell and be able to buy some bread to that family of four that will never ever have access to your standard of life. and they never will, because the only reason you have access to this impossible, expensive, wasteful, consumption minded way of life is if the global south burns for your sake.
but your life sucks. so you log into the internet and you say that well, white latinos are privileged too. in the vaults of the CIA, there are thousands of pages of how to torture white latinos who decided that they had enough of this system. in the depths of the pacific ocean, thousands of bones of white argentinians became home for corals, after they were tortured to death and thrown out of helicopters. but white latinos are privileged. rubens paiva was buried and dug out three times before they quartered his body and threw the pieces in the same ocean he used to teach his five children how to swim.
but your life sucks. you're an american. you believe you're exceptional, even in your pain. you believe you can never be wrong. you believe no one has ever suffered like you do, and that everywhere in the world, things work the same as they do around you. in january 2025, the brazilian government finally amended rubens paiva's death certificate to state he was killed under torture perpetrated by the brazilian state in 1971.
but your life sucks. we just don't get it.
vaporwave
ellievsbear
jbbartram-illu
