Wilson Jones walks through the quiet remains of what once was the beating heart of his family’s lumber empire — the Mackeys Ferry Sawmill in North Carolina.ContentsTariffs Push Manufacturing Toward CrisisTariffs Fall Short of PromisesIndustries Feeling the Full Brunt of TariffsRural Communities Bear the Brunt of Tariff ChaosEconomists Warn of the Hidden CostsLoyalty Despite LossesRising […]
I saw a post from someone who said that, since the system had always kinda worked for him, he assumed it worked for everyone. And once he realized that wasn’t true, and that differing perspectives brought value to both his life and his product, he changed.
This is a family who, aside from Faux “News”, has always had the system kinda working for them, and they don’t understand (see: Faux “News”) that [a] the system doesn’t work for people who aren’t white male business owners, and [b] the system can very easily stop working for them as well.
I think it’s a combination of ignorance/mental protection. It’s mentally taxing and depressing to realize that so many people are being oppressed by the system due to no fault of their own. It’s the reason there’s such vehement backlash against teaching any amount of critical theory in the US, because it basically amounts to realizing “everything you ever knew was a lie, and life is profoundly unfair”. It’s deeply unsettling to think that someone is suffering because of random chance and the systems we’ve built, so instead you reject it and comfort yourself by victim blaming instead, because then you don’t have to worry about falling into that same hole.