When the Devil Hands Out Candy
Someone I love who grew up poor was skeptical but overjoyed when the Democrat’s huge student loan forgiveness program was announced. She had gone through grad school, worked for years as a precarious adjunct, and now works an ever fluctuating number of stressful jobs. She still has a mountain of debt.
When I say she was overjoyed, this is a simplification. As the program was hinted at, then as the news dropped, then as the details were released, she went through stages, from skeptical, to reluctant, to—finally, as though it were a painful act—hopeful. At the time, this progression seemed beautiful. Yes. You’re going to get relief. It’s going to be okay. In retrospect, it’s just another layer of tragedy, because the bureaucratic requirements and the arbitrary hurdles standing between her and actual debt relief are probably insurmountable. Seeing all the work she has to go through to probably get nothing, seeing her hopes get dashed, her initial mistrust vindicated, it’s clear: this is abusive.
My relationship to scarcity is not as fraught as hers is. When the prospect of scarcity comes up, I feel anxious but I don’t get triggered. For example, I’ve never known hunger, so it’s probably no coincidence that I’ve never felt afraid about not having food to eat. However, there were many times when the only reason I wasn’t going hungry, especially those years when I was living undocumented, is because in so-called wealthy countries the dumpsters overfloweth. My income has never been above the poverty line, but the times I’ve been back in the States and applied for food stamps, I’ve had to prove I’m a real person and prove I don’t have some secret bank account somewhere.
You can’t prove a negative. What the fuck am I supposed to do? Come in with a certified letter from every bank in the country stating I don’t have an account with them? That would have felt devastating if I hadn’t known in a pinch I could take what I needed from the trash or steal it from the store.
All the very real words around emotional and psychological abuse that have been so cheapened by how they get thrown around on the internet? They could be fairly and accurately applied to how governments treat their subjects, especially in those moments when they are supposedly taking care of us, supposedly protecting us. And that dynamic of dependence, of paternalistic harm, also tracks.
I don’t have much more to say in this newsletter. Just that I really wish people would stop trusting the government or acting like it’s anything other than a horrific, harmful entity. Sometimes, you have to fight for short term survival, and sometimes that means accepting minor reforms, insulting handouts, or a change in government policies. That’s okay as long as it’s never the goal, never our horizon. But the government is never going to help us in any meaningful way, it is incapable of helping us without also hurting us or holding us back at the same time. And many people become complicit in the dehumanization implicit in social welfare programs when they talk about such programs as harm reduction, or when they guilt us into voting in the latest, most important once-in-a-lifetime election, because we’d be voting on behalf of oppressed people.
All governments are the enemy of life on this planet. If they ever offer us anything, it’s poisoned candy or a trojan horse. At best, in the moments when we’re strong and threatening, it’s a bribe to keep us from taking the whole bag of candy. Let’s take what we need for survival, but never stop dreaming of a day when we will take care of one another without any more abusive institutions in the way. A world without debt, without police, without private property, without industries polluting our air and water, without borders or settlers. A world of everything for everyone.
Postscript: Citations and Tangents
Here’s one on the topic of not trusting the government in any of its guises. If you get far enough into this article from the Guardian, it does a good job of showing how bipartisan the border is, and that shouldn’t surprise anyone. Policed borders and the murder that entails are an intrinsic part of any state.
It’s also a big concern for me how talk around abuse is misused, simplified, or forced into reductionist categories that don’t leave space for people’s actual experiences and block off any paths towards transformation, and I’m worried by how systems of oppression that function in very different ways are often conflated through metaphor. So I don’t mean it as a metaphor, that the State is like an abusive father, I mean that literally the State is harmful and causes us psychological damage in how it operates. I might go into this more on my video commentary on this newsletter, but in the meantime, it doesn’t hurt to go back to some of the original theorists of transformative justice in Black feminism, as an important way forward and an antidote to the harmfully reductionist and misinformed takes that predominate on the interwebs.
Texts of the Week
The Value of Homelessness, by Craig Willse, provides a solid analysis of how poverty and specifically homelessness are produced and racialized by government action and social services.
And here’s a fun read on plant intelligence from Michael Pollan