Ever since I was born, sometime in like the 15th century, my favorite neighborhood in Austin, Texas has always been the lower Eastside. Though there is no factual evidence to confirm this, and historically speaking I probably feel the opposite, I just love the culture there! The Eastside has always been the most diverse place in Austin since I officially moved here in 2001, when I was like 400 y/o. However, I’ve noticed that change in recent years. I just need to set up a brief history of my experiences, however, before I begin this: turns out, I moved to the U.S. during the civil war, and then witnessed the entire history of racism and the systematic oppression of minorities in the U.S. including things like “The 1928 Master Plan” which served to move all the PoC population in Austin to the Eastside. Therefore, I believe that class-lines and race-lines often line up.
So, what I’m saying is that this gentrification taking place in East Austin is a matter of public discourse because it does not promote the protection of the life, liberty, and especially property, of the people of East Austin. Now, I’ve been around for a long time, obviously, so I know I blew up around the time that guy Thomas Jefferson sampled some of my works in his. However, I will remind everyone of my core principle: that everyone, regardless of class, race, gender has a right to Life, Liberty, and Property. I also have this thing about what should and should not be argued publicly and I’d like to say that the happenings on the Eastside deserve a public discourse, and maybe even an overdue peoples revolution!
There’s one specific incidence I want to discuss which I read about in The Austin Chronicle, a news source which embodies everything I, John Locke, love about my city (Go Riverbats!). The Chronicle argues that gentrification works to make real-estate developers extremely aggressive in certain neighborhoods. As a result of all of the revamping and construction which will then take place in a neighborhood deemed hot by developers, generally people of lower-socioeconomic class levels are forced to move out when the rent or property taxes go up due to all the commerce brought about by the new development. This in its self does not deserve to be the topic of public discourse. No one is dying, no one is necessarily stealing or illegally obtaining property, and the liberty to live wherever you want still exists as long as you can pay it. However, there is one particular case which took place in February of 2015 which deserve a public discourse: the destruction of my favorite piñata shop by F&F Real Estate Ventures. According to the Austin Chronicle the family owned shop was destroyed without any prior notice to the family, in order to make way for some SXSW infrastructure. This violates this family’s right to property! The fact that the Chronicle reports that all of this was done legally only strengthens my argument that this deserve a public discourse.
In fact, I think a lot of these racially charged issues deserve to be topic of public discourse on account of historical context:
I always say that government only exists with the peoples consent, and they make laws which are supposed to be rationality embodied. So that’s the very first problem we have to deal with here before we move on. I believe one racial issue, over all other issues, should not be a topic of public discourse, but instead a topic of revolution by the people. As I said before, I witnessed the civil war, and therefore I know that PoC are no longer regarded as slaves in the U.S. However, the U.S. government was established before the civil war, and therefore does not exist by the consent of all of the freed slaves who after the civil war began to live within that government. This in it self calls for a complete over throw of the government by all ex-slaves after the civil war, which we know never happened. The closest we came was Reconstruction, which was run by people who were not elected with the consent of most freed men. Laws began to crop up after the civil war then, which were not rational, such as laws limiting freed-men’s ability to give their consent to the U.S. government in the way that the U.S. government was set up to allow people to give their consent (Jim Crow). Political Society absolutely requires the consent of the governed to exist and it has never been given to an extent which satisfies me.
Some haters may say that I have also argued that governments may act on the consent of the majority, because gaining the consent of the whole is nearly impossible, and the majority of people did vote for ALL of this to happen. However, I argue that the racism felt by the majority of people in the U.S. was NOT a matter of public discourse in the first place and therefore should not have ever been discussed by the government and should definitely not have been included in any kind of policy.Legislation should only be made of issues that are public discourse. These laws which promoted segregation and oppression were also tyrannical in the first place because they acted against the protection of the liberty, and property of PoC, as well as latently promoted the general public to act towards taking the right to life away.