This text was distributed in the streets of Paris in the journal Paris Sous Tension as an anarchist response to the opportunistic use of a certain anti-sexist politic to attack migrants and poor people in the area.
It's easy to just look out for yourself. It's easy to want to push hardship out of sight when you don't feel affected by it, when the system favours you. It's easy to find excuses not to be in solidarity in these democracies that have found ways to dress themselves up, “liberty, equality, fraternity” (1), and relegate cruelty to a darker past or to far-away lands, to cover your eyes and not see what's going on outside your door. It's easy to be contemptuous of those who struggle to survive, at least for those whose money allows them so much. But it's also easy to brag about your success, your cash, your social position that's held up as a model, as a way to conceal your own existential and emotional misery, the disappointment in the face of our childhood dreams of freedom and self-fulfillment, this frustration that all the money in the world couldn't take away. And yet, there are those who feel no shame in pushing these plain truths aside with their arrogance.