Palestine

[The Grand Nudger]

On some level, it's an acknowledgement of all the labor and improvement that went into a place. We didn't find the earth this way..so if you roll up on big fields full of tomatoes you're definitely looking at the literal fruit of someone elses labor...but the dirt under those tomatoes is no more natural or native than the crop that grows out of it. The water is generally brought it. The building materials were manufactured and transported and assembled. Hundreds of years of this. Thousands of years of this. Possibly tens of thousands of years of this. Alot of death and loss and tears and sweat and expectation.

To lose all of that, to be made homeless in the most definite and overarching sense - if nothing else would make a person pick up a rock with malice....this one will. Not that this stops us from displacing people..and often by swearing up and down we'll use the land better..so, you know, thanks for all the prep work. We've got a place for you just over that hill so pack your stuff up and hit the trail. You're gonna love it, it's just as good as what we're taking.

I know all this, or at least I can conceive of it and understand, but I'm also familiar with that justification. I see my neighbors out here going broke while destroying their properties and I think "fuck, I could use that land better - and for a really decent purpose!". Thankfully, I have yet to pick up a gun and take it....but you never know, with how many kids I have a day may come where an army of my descendants finally makes good on their great great grand patrons suspicions that he could work that land better than the other guys ever did.

Just my colonizer/conqueror mindset, as the kids would say.