Reese

“Racial tensions had long been simmering when, in 1863, Irish immigrants in Manhattan mounted one of the most violent anti-Black insurrections in American history. Angered by a law drafting them to fight in the Civil War—ostensibly to free slaves who might then take their jobs—rioters filled the streets, lynching Black people and burning down the Colored Orphan Asylum on Fifth Avenue as 233 children escaped out the back.”
― Andrea Elliott, Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival, and Hope in an American City

“I also worried about her morale. During Linda’s first season working for Amazon, she had seen up close the vast volume of crap Americans were buying and felt disgusted. That experience had planted a seed of disenchantment. After she left the warehouse, it continued to grow. When she had downsized from a large RV to a minuscule trailer, Linda had also been reading about minimalism and the tiny house movement. She had done a lot of thinking about consumer culture and about how much garbage people cram into their short lives. I wondered where all those thoughts would lead. Linda was still grappling with them. Weeks later, after starting work in Kentucky, she would post the following message on Facebook and also text it directly to me: Someone asked why do you want a homestead? To be independent, get out of the rat race, support local businesses, buy only American made. Stop buying stuff I don’t need to impress people I don’t like. Right now I am working in a big warehouse, for a major online supplier. The stuff is crap all made somewhere else in the world where they don’t have child labor laws, where the workers labor fourteen- to sixteen-hour days without meals or bathroom breaks. There is one million square feet in this warehouse packed with stuff that won’t last a month. It is all going to a landfill. This company has hundreds of warehouses. Our economy is built on the backs of slaves we keep in other countries, like China, India, Mexico, any third world country with a cheap labor force where we don’t have to see them but where we can enjoy the fruits of their labor. This American Corp. is probably the biggest slave owner in the world. After sending that, she continued: Radical I know, but this is what goes through my head when I’m at work. There is nothing in that warehouse of substance. It enslaved the buyers who use their credit to purchase that shit. Keeps them in jobs they hate to pay their debts. It’s really depressing to be there. Linda added that she was coping”
― Jessica Bruder, Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century

“Sometimes people don’t change for the better,” he said. “We say to ourselves, there’s a chance they will get better. But there’s a chance they won’t. That’s the alternate story nobody wants to see.”
― Dawn Turner, Three Girls from Bronzeville: A Uniquely American Memoir of Race, Fate, and Sisterhood

“I think about the parable of the little girl and the starfish told to me by a grandparent, though I can’t remember which. A young girl walks along a beach on which thousands of starfish have washed up during a terrible storm. She begins picking up the starfish, one by one, and throwing them back into the sea. An old man walks down to the beach and asks the young girl, “Why are you doing this? Look at how many starfish there are. You cannot possibly begin to make a difference.” The girl pays the man no mind and picks up another starfish and throws it back into the waves. Then she says to the old man, “It made a difference to that one.”
― Isaac Fitzgerald, Dirtbag, Massachusetts: A Confessional