Let's stop pretending we can manage our way out of here

a note from the rural edge of a dying empire

“Let’s stop pretending we can manage our way out of here, let’s stop defending the indefensible.” — Billy Bragg

Understand, this is not a plea for charity or sympathy, it is a demand for justice for us all:

When I made the decision to have the surgery that resolved my hypertrophic cardiomyopathy and gave me breath and vitality in ways I never knew I could experience, a part of the choice of timing was medical -- I was at a point where had the condition progressed further, the surgery would not have been as effective. But another part of the calculation was political and financial: I understood that by the end of the year, the health insurance I had through the Affordable Care Act would likely be unaffordable and that it might be many, many years before I could afford a surgery that was absolutely necessary from a medical perspective but which no hospital would be legally required to perform until it would be too late to be helpful. It was only by the grace of my ancestors and the gods we swear by and the sharp mind of a doctor in a small regional hospital that has since lost a third of its beds and a lot of its medical staff that I knew I needed the operation soon enough to make the choice to have it. And it was only through the generosity of this community that my family and I were able to weather the month of lost income it required.

Despite the amazing healing that I have experienced, my body is still learning to lower its blood pressure, and is dependent on pharmaceuticals to continue to do so. A week ago the state of Maine told all of us receiving partial subsidies for our ACA-funded insurance that that funding has been slashed to the point where many of us will see our premiums go up by hundreds of dollars a month. I won’t be able to pay that. Yes, there are herbs that could help me. And at this point I know more about herbs for blood pressure than all but a handful of people. But like a shoeless cobbler, I don’t have access to them because I am spending too much money on health insurance and groceries (and I eat minimally and a reduction in the quality of my food would also set back my healing) and many of the herbs I would need don’t grow nearby in enough volume for me to make my own medicine.

The irony is that I am actually making more money from my work than I ever have before. I have considered looking for other work, and am open to supplemental possibilities, but the truth is that those opportunities are minimal for a middle aged Autistic man whose work history has been devoted to activism, journalism, and herbalism, and all of them (except working for ICE or being a prison guard) pay less than what I am making doing what I do now.

And despite this, if not for the kindness of friends who let me live on their land, I would be homeless when even in Western Maine rent prices have gone through the roof thanks to the vulture funds that control the housing market around the world, even in small towns, and the way in which AirBnB has turned housing stock into vacation rentals. And people I love are facing foreclosures and evictions or are already homeless. (And of course, some people I love are in even more precarious situations, anticipating the arrival of armed men in unmarked cars in badge-less uniforms coming to imprison or deport them. And in Gaza, genocide escalates, and revels itself to be a new form of “primitive accumulation” in which the rubble and bones and ashes of a nation and a culture will be the foundation on which luxury hotels and server farms will be constructed to serve the whims and desires of the stratospherically wealthy lords of cloud capital.)

None of this needs to be this way. But as Oyster-farmer, veteran, and U.S. Senate candidate, Graham Platner said the other night in Portland, it is this way because of the decisions a political class in the thrall of the wealthy has made in these past decades – but it is also this way because we have allowed it to be this way. (Of course, I would also argue this is the predictable end the cultural logic of capitalism has brought us to.) How much worse does it need to get before we will refuse to allow it to continue?

My Irish ancestors stood up to the landlords and forced them to flee (though my distant relations living there now currently face the same housing crisis we face on this side of the Atlantic because their own government has sold the nation out to global capital.) In my younger years, I met people in Colombia and Bolivia and El Salvador and Oaxaca who stood up against insurmountable odds to defend the land and the people. It comes to us now to find how we each will follow their example.