You’re probably thinking: why do you care this much about these arson attacks?
Why keep talking about it? Why keep coming back to it?
Alright. I’ll get a little personal—not too personal, just enough to explain where I’m coming from.
I’ve worked a few jobs at this point in my life. I’m not going to name where, and I’m not going to get into private details. But what I will say is that I’ve worked through some intensely toxic political periods in recent American history.
I worked during COVID.
I worked during the 2020 election.
I worked during the years when everything felt like it was boiling over every other week.
I worked during the trials involving Donald Trump.
And during those years, the political climate felt incredibly polarized, tense, and unpredictable.
After seeing MAGA supporters storm buildings, harass officials, threaten institutions, and culminate in the January 6 Capitol Riot, I’m going to be honest:
There were times I genuinely worried some bullshit could happen at places I worked.
Not because I had inside information. Not because something specific was planned.
Because when political violence starts getting normalized, uncertainty enters everyday life.
You start wondering:
Could someone show up angry?
Could some extremist decide to make a statement?
Could a workplace become collateral in someone else’s ideology?
That kind of background anxiety is real.
And guess who was loudly condemning that stuff back then?
Progressives.
Leftists.
Liberals.
They were right to condemn it.
They recognized that storming buildings, threatening people, and normalizing intimidation was dangerous and corrosive.
So now when I see some of those same spaces being glib, evasive, or unserious about arson attacks at workplaces, yeah—it bothers me deeply.
Because consistency matters.
If political violence was unacceptable then, dangerous now doesn’t become acceptable because the target changed or because the rhetoric sounds more anti-corporate.
No.
Danger to workers is danger to workers.
And I need to say something else too.
Yes, I care about how workers get screwed over. I care about exploitation. I care about inequality. I care about the way corporations often prioritize profit over people.
Of course I do.
But I try not to let anger cloud judgment.
I try not to let frustration turn every destructive act into something automatically righteous.
I try not to assume that because the system has problems, we are therefore suddenly living in some grand revolutionary moment where anything done “against the system” becomes justified.
Because I don’t think we’re there.
Not yet.
Are conditions tense? Yes.
Is inequality real? Yes.
Are people frustrated? Absolutely.
Are institutions under strain? Clearly.
But there’s a difference between turbulence and systemic collapse.
There’s a difference between polarization and full-scale breakdown.
There’s a difference between discontent and revolutionary conditions.
And too many people online blur those lines because it feels dramatic.
But if you want to know what real crisis often looks like historically, it’s not just angry posts and scattered acts of sabotage.
It’s deeper structural failure.
It’s mass unemployment.
It’s cascading business failures.
It’s severe financial instability.
It’s systems that stop functioning in ordinary ways.
It’s the kind of broad economic collapse where everyday life itself becomes unstable.
We are not there in the total sense.
We may be seeing warning signs, pressures, cracks, contradictions—but that is not the same thing as total rupture.
And that distinction matters because when people falsely convince themselves they’re already in revolutionary times, they start justifying reckless behavior as historically necessary.
That mindset is dangerous.
It can make people romanticize chaos instead of preparing for real solutions.
It can make them confuse symbolic destruction with material progress.
It can make them stop caring about the innocent people caught in the middle.
Right now, for all its flaws and injustices, capitalism is still functioning. Supply chains still run. Markets still move. Jobs still exist. Rent is still due. Paychecks still matter. People are still trying to survive inside the current system whether they like it or not.
That means actions that destroy workplaces don’t occur in some fantasy vacuum.
They hit real workers living in the present.
And if a day comes when deeper collapse happens—if systems truly start seizing up on their own, if mass layoffs spread everywhere, if institutions fail at scale—that would be a different and much darker conversation.
But we should not pretend we are already there simply because it feels emotionally satisfying to do so.
That kind of premature revolutionary thinking often produces bad judgment.
And bad judgment gets innocent people hurt.
So why do I care so much about these arsons?
Because I’ve worked jobs.
Because I know workplaces are not abstract targets.
Because I know what it feels like to work during unstable political times and wonder if some extremist nonsense could spill into ordinary life.
Because I remember condemning violence when the right normalized it.
Because I’m not going to suddenly stop condemning danger now that some people on the left are getting sloppy about it.
Because workers deserve consistency.
Because safety matters no matter who creates the threat.
Because ideology should never matter more than human life.
That’s why I care.