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Open Up: The Refugees are Coming
I’ll stake my future on the solidarity of the people over the cynicism of the elite.
The displacement of over four million Ukrainians to other parts of the world has got me thinking about the relationship of people to places. Thanks to war, climate change, and economic pressures (which are all rapidly becoming one and the same) an increasing number of people are finding themselves dispossessed.
It’s not necessarily a new story. Here in America, for example, colonists displaced the indigenous populations, then turned the land from a living partner into claimed territory, owned property, and eventually speculative real estate. Land ownership became the new way of being able to claim the right to use or even occupy one place or another.
Until recently, I have been blaming the increasing tension around land and its use to capitalism. In my own lifetime, I’ve witnessed as Walmart and hundreds of other major corporate retail chains have taken over our world. Local restaurants, shops, and even services like appliance repair have been replaced by corporate chains. Former small business owners became employees of distant corporations, and the problem this created was more than the aesthetic difference between a mom and pop business and a Starbucks, Dicks, or Outback. The bigger problem is…
