By Gabriel Bernales
What is self-reliance? A curse? A punishment? Trauma? Some might even say it’s an insult. The clown claims they are self-reliant, while juggling the content of others for applause. The cost of self-reliance sometimes can come at a price: misery. Well, misery does love company.
We always misunderstand that self-reliance relies on others but is always able to do things for yourself without anyone bothering. There is a power dynamic between the two because if you don’t cooperate, you resort to compulsion.
The upperclass loves to tell us we should rise above it and shrug it off. They loved the proclamation of being self-reliant because their source of wealth doesn’t depend on the state as long as you don’t count the policies and enforcement that were made for them to benefit from.
Every time a disaster strikes our nation, countless people especially the working class, who suffer most at the hands of those the masses call ‘saviors. However, this cycle seems to have grown tiresome for us, we are here conditioned to accept weaponized incompetence and mediocrity.
We become miserable every day, telling the message just always be stronger, wiser, and our favorite buzzword, “resilient”. News flash, not everyone has the luxury of decompression because we constantly search for sustenance to avoid the scarcity of nature. Unfortunately for us, we live in a world of property that the majority of us forcefully denied access to.
Self-reliance is a feedback loop with no one to give feedback to. The physical facts of our existence that attach to ourselves become identity when we put a narrative around them, the self is a story and stories are made to be shared.
