This was originally a copost on this but I realized it was a bummer even by that post's standards and didn't wanna leave that on someone else's notes.
A thing that is fascinating in it's own horrific way, is how this country will just ... let whole cities die.
My mum lives in Aberdeen, WA.
You have probably never heard of it, unless you are an extremely huge Kurt Cobain nerd, because it was his hometown.
The first time I went there it was in a heavy fog in the dead of night and I honestly thought we'd wandered into Silent Hill. If felt like a ghost town, still haunted by the occasional ominous light from places offering the opposite of shelter. Just casinos and bars and men who look like they'd drag a rusty knife through your innards for the price of another whiskey.
When you see it in the cold light of day, the mental image scarcely lifts.
Aberdeen is not a town, it is the corpse of a town. It's last economic relevance was in the 40s, when it was apparently a launching point for ships in the Pacific front. The docks still exist, across the bay, but see only a fraction of the business they ever did, especially with the decline of the logging industry.
9 out of 10 buildings you walk past as you go through town are abandoned, and mostly in such state of decay that no one is likely to see opportunity in the rock bottom property values any time soon.
There's a tiny cluster of chain stores at the entrance to the city and past that, only a few shops and a perpetually long line out the door of the unemployment and food stamp offices.
6 months in that town and I understood how someone like Cobain could grow up depressed. The only people who live there are people like my mom, who couldn't afford to live anywhere else after my dad died, or else people who can't afford to move anywhere else. I knew instinctively that if I didn't somehow get out of that town, it would be the end of my life.
And collectively our society, our system just ... lets that happen. To countless towns and whole cities across the country. Hell, whole nations in the case of places like Puerto Rico. And everyone talks about them as if they're just some sad but unavoidable tragedy, instead of a decision that a lot of people made to just leave whole spots of the map to rot.
People die in these places, for want of food or housing or medicine, or even just for the sense that society itself has abandoned them, but somehow this kind of mass neglect never gets counted against capitalism the way it would for any other system.