I’ve lived in a big city for years now. Never seen anybody get mugged, or shot, or carjacked, despite doing activist work that often has me visiting poor minority neighborhoods.
The only time I ever really felt uneasy was when I had to walk alone at night through a neighborhood where all the businesses had bars on the windows. Worst thing that happened was a couple of people asking me for money, and they didn’t give me any shit when I said I didn’t carry cash.
But any time I visit the small town where I grew up there’s always someone or another acting like I came back from a fucking warzone lmao
Capitalism makes rural life untenable, and forces people into the cities in search of jobs that pay high enough to survive off of. This forces people of different ethnic and religious backgrounds into close proximity with one another, which leads to diversity which reactionaries see as the destruction of the traditional heterogeneous society. Cities are also highly polluted, easy to get sick in, and full of safety hazards. Capitalism creates poverty alongside urbanization, and poverty leads to addiction, mental illness, and crime (since poverty is criminalized under capitalism, and so is doing what you need to survive, like stealing food) which in turn leads to overpolicing, prison slavery, etc… Reactionaries skip over the part where capitalism causes poverty, and assume the cities themselves cause crime. Along with their favorite scapegoats: immigrants and minorities. So I think there’s a combination of economic, environmental, and cultural grievances one can have with cities. Some of these grievances are reactionary, and some are sincere displeasure with the inconveniences of urban life (the economic and environmental issues, mainly).
Pretty sure the perception that cities are very violent is entirely untrue. There are violent cities, but they, as you send, in places with truly appalling abuse and exploitation. And in America at least a lot of the violence is centered in GOP help first and second ring suburbs rather than in cities themselves.
Yes. I could have worded it more carefully. I guess I’m trying to say that capitalism causes both violence and urbanization, and reactionaries simply associate violence and urbanization with each other, rather than their root cause: Capitalism.