Rise, Sun

I've been struggling to come up with the words for what I want to say. I guess you can say my mind has been wandering, between what's going on with me personally and what's going on in the world, it's very overwhelming. I guess the overarching theme is just how much trust has eroded, how much ground distrust has been allowed to gain, and how much trust was placed mistakenly.

My natural inclination is to be distrustful, a reflection of my lived experiences and my self-confidence. When it comes to gaining my trust it's very much an uphill battle, I do a lot of scrutinizing that people aren't even aware of to try to build an accurate idea of who they actually are. I'm fined tuned to recognize patterns and to figure out intentions, it's something that's very finely embedded in my nervous system and isn't something I can shut off. It's a protection mechanism, not rooted in ego or superiority but rather in just simply not wanting to be hurt. A lot of that also stems from my inability to fully trust myself, to place trust in my abilities and that I can navigate this life to something prosperous.

So while I'm already quite familiar with distrust's presence, how it drives my hyper-awareness, what is going on in the world has amplified it a crazy amount. We have over 110 armed conflicts going on in the world right now. People with disabilities, auto immune disorders, autism and mental health conditions have been identified as a "threat to the American people and our way of life." We have children with United States citizenship being deported, on top of all of the other non-white human beings being herded like cattle and exiled without due process. Married women are having their right to vote threatened with the SAVE act, we're now going to be exporting the one valuable piece of high end tech, AI Chips, in order to make up the income we wouldn't have lost if these horrid tariffs were put in place. It goes on and on and on.

If we had the manufacturing capacity, tariffs could actually be a positive tool. The reality of the matter is we don't, the material and goods that we are able to source and produce locally is a drop in the bucket in comparison to what we import. The countries levied with tariffs don't pay whatever percentage when exporting their goods to us, it is our importers who do, who then in turn pass the bill to whatever company they're importing for, who then passes it on to us obedient consumers. The AI chip trade restrictions being lifted isn't going to benefit us American citizens, instead that money is going to go to corporations like NVidia and AMD, who are going to pocket as much as they can.

Meanwhile, the average cost of gasoline is $3.14 a gallon, but Trump claimed some states had it at $1.98 a gallon. The lowest cost was actually $2.66 a gallon, a blatant lie delivered to continue giving the impression he's working on bettering things for the people, which is completely false. He's bettering things for those who shell out money to him, be it directly or via his pump-and-dump crypto currency. Why else would the Federal Reserve ring off it's five-alarm warning bell?

My family is pulling in the most amount of money we ever have and are still struggling just as bad when we were bringing in a third of the income. It is only going to get worse. They're proposing repealing the USA PATRIOT Act, the one with all the privacy-infringing laws because our government has always viewed us as terrorists, which sounds like a good thing, right? The USA PATRIOT Act also had a part geared towards stopping money laundering.

This is what the repeal is really about, getting rid of the paper trail required for large transactions. This administration has already shown they don't respect the rule of law, so the surveillance made legal by the USA PATRIOT Act is surely going to continue regardless of repeal, not to mention that we already operate under surveillance by conglomerates like Amazon, Apple, Google, and Meta among others. They know the public has grown increasingly concerned about their privacy and are taking advantage of that to gain back the ability to hide their transactions. In the context of everything going on right now, that is incredibly terrifying.

I could keep going, but I hope I've made my point clear. They're not interested in the betterment of us lowly civilians, they want to bleed dry what little we have left. If he was sincere in lowering prices for the average consumer, it would have been done already. If there was sincerity in treating the various ailments that are common in our society, there would be investments in bettering quality and access to care and in research, not into reopening and expanding prisons or a massive military parade for a draft dodger. If we were serious about national security, we wouldn't be antagonizing our closest allies and pursuing isolationism that is going to cause absolute havoc, we wouldn't be selling off our technology to enemies.

History repeats itself. This didn't have to happen, and it still doesn't, it just requires the American people waking up and taking back what is ours. Stop playing their game riddled with labels and recognize that all of us have a lot more in common with each other then we do with the Bezos, Musks, Bidens and Trumps of the world. They've played everyone like fiddles, but there's still time to course correct.

Update: Since I posted this, the mayor of Newark, NJ was arrested for protesting at an arriving to summon them to court regarding permit and inspection violations in the opening of their private ICE detention facility. This was well within his powers as mayor, the protest that was ongoing at this facility was unrelated to Ras Baraka carrying out his duties. ICE doesn't want their facilities viewed by outside eyes, that should be incredibly concerning to everybody.