are we complicit or oppressed?

i read this in a paragraph of a book about canada but it sounds exactly like us. i always thought it was funny that canada was this vast grey space above us on the scroll down school wall map and we  learned nothing about it maybe other than to dissociate our empire of democracy from the old empire we escaped. it's the same.  “an extraction economy built in violation of indigenous land rights and human rights.” empire is the same everywhere to the other.
“all of us who have gathered here can acknowledge where we came from and how we collectively came to this point.”

 
More often than not, difference has been so effortlessly met with state violence turned law turned status quo. Diversity works only for whiteness, for those who are happy to benevolently oversee and control diversity in all its frivolous forms, but who will enforce the power of their laws the moment difference seeks actual power. 

Before I Was a Critic I Was a Human Being by Amy Fung

 

goo'morning, sunshine. fog. last night the fullish moon and cramped with cats kept r. up and i caught a crick in my back. i watched céline and julie go boating while r. slept. it's not what i would expect, and r. said that looks nice, but it's soul strange. i had to continue but it was like a dream you keep going back into to understand something opaque that keeps changing yet stays stubbornly the same. i dreamed subsequently of going into a medical center cubicle all disheveled droop masked and dropping stuff shuffling round a pregnant girl. then i was in an apartment and came home and there was an iguana looking at me from the cubby hole above the sink where i used to have my round river stone on a wooden scroll rest, then i remembered i was supposed to mind the iguana for someone. then i saw a giant green lizard in the pantry and the iguana was in its mouth looking out. no! i said and grabbed the lizard neck trying to make it cough up the iguana but i felt a big gulp and it was gone. i still saw them both looking at me, one inside the mouth of the other, eyes bright watching me.