memes

Here in Australia, there's a stereotype that Aboriginal people are lazy, because they don't like working all day to make capitalists rich. Well I don't like working all day to make capitalists rich either, and if My ancestors only had to work a few hours a day to survive, I'd be resentful about it too.

The precolonial Australian landscape was carefully managed to improve the ability of the land to support people. Aboriginal people used fire to control the development of plant life to create ideal habitats for the animals they hunted. The ecosystem was engineered to improve efficiency. That's why they didn't have to work long hours. They worked smarter, not harder. They built an ecosystem that made life easier.

Today I learned about the proper way to hunt crabs in the land where I live. You use a two-pronged stick, and you don't stab the crab. You let it grab on. Young crabs will run away from you, so you don't chase them, they're not done growing up yet. The fully grown crabs will come towards your stick, and then you can have them. So you don't waste time trying to chase down small crabs that don't have much meat, and in so doing, you preserve the environment. You take what you need, and it's easier than fighting against nature.

Fight nature? No way! That's for white fellas. Aboriginal people didn't do that. They followed methods that have been improved over tens of thousands of years to live without harming the land, carefully keeping it intact for the next generations. If you fucked with the land and made it unsustainable for the next generation, you destroyed your way of life. That's a murder-suicide against your entire family. Nobody's gonna let you do that. People would stop you.

I wouldn't call somebody a capitalist because they work for money. That's sadly just the way it is. Capitalism is a system based around capital and not just money.