bear with me here: imagine telling a person whose primary source of release and pleasure, what gets them through a hellish week of unappreciated and grueling work, is the prospect of unwinding with cheap beer and good friends, that they can't have that, indefinitely 1/x

imagine telling them that while not just not giving them any timeline for when then can have that back, but not giving them any alternative that approximates it, and also *while plunging them into more precarity and desperation without ANY substantive material support* 2/x

imagine telling them all this WHILE AUTHORITIES WHO ARE SUPPOSED TO HAVE THEIR INTERESTS AT HEART variously lie to them, give them conflicting messages, and always, always, make it about THEIR INDIVIDUAL CHOICES and INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS rather than any collective action 3/x

imagine doing all this, and then insisting the real problem as these people variously and inevitably do what they are told, become fatalistic, or just fucking crack that the core issue here IS THEIR PERSONAL MORAL FAILINGS rather than leadership failures or structural forces 4/x

imagine all this happening in a social and political environment in which both morbidly acting out IRL and moralizing against it virtually together sustain, in a sick dialectic, an ongoing churn of human deaths, above all among the already-most desperate and disenfranchised 5/x

again, this is not about *exculpating* individual people. and yes fuck the folks with guns demanding haircuts or death, that's another story. but the problem here - the core problem - is not just about individuals and their shitty choices. we have to see more than that. 6/6

just gonna append this, b/c it's part and parcel. /end https://twitter.com/PatBlanchfield/status/1264539598312681472