Broken

It seems so mundane as to be unmentionable, to say that my life has been shaped by the failures of the US healthcare system. It happens to everyone. That's what it means when we call it a system.

When I was about eleven, my mom developed mega toxic pan colitis as a consequence of underlying ulcerative colitis -- she shat blood, so much that it was killing her. She checked into a hospital but even after twenty days interred, the best prognosis the doctors could give her was: you have six months to live. So, she hit her bucket list.

Our family managed to vacation in China when my father's career took him there on a trip. We actually got stuck in Beijing during 9/11, and I showed up to 7th grade a week late. My mom had another attack while in Beijing, and ended up in the ER. Once stabilized, a doctor explained that diet control would dramatically improve her condition -- eliminating things like gluten, as if they were allergens. That advice took the condition from being devastating to livable, for many years.

As is the case with chronic conditions, they don't go away, and any serious hit to the chemistry of your body can trigger devastation. So, eventually, she had an attack, and went to the hospital, bleeding places you shouldn't. Bleeding a lot. The ER put her up, and didn't believe her. It got worse. They didn't believe her. It got worse. They didn't believe her. Over and over and over all in one nightmarish night until her insides split open. Even then, it was only a nurse breaking the chain of command who called a surgeon. If not for this defiant intervention, my mom would be dead. Instead, she lost six organs.

She was rushed to surgery. Parts of her had to be reconstructed. Resewn. She died on that table, and describes it as a phenomenon I call the Stillness. She expected death to ease her pain, for there to be some... change. Of any kind. But her last experience, of all-consuming agony, remained like an image burned onto a screen. It just... stayed like that. Then they brought her back.

She's still alive, plus or minus an organ. Needless to say, it was hard for us all. I was just a kid and I didn't understand the weight and terror of our society. I went to school and got called faggot and pledged allegiance real good. I internalized its bigotries and was a shitty little teenager. We are all made into weapons and we are all stabbing each other. As an adult, who has now lived with the weight and terror, I can only begin to imagine the love and support she needed, that she was unable to get both from institutions and her community. I could see the pain, but I couldn't understand it. Now that I can, I want to say I wish she lived in a society even half as compassionate as her love as a mother.

...

It happens to everyone. You know someone, or are someone. Lives ground down, destroyed, snuffed by the machinery of authorizations and networks and deductibles and rent. Because my parents were without health insurance when my mom briefly died, the hospital wrote us off as unable to pay, hitting the family in the credit for the privilege of maiming negligence. Pursuing malpractice would've taken money we didn't have, means we needed for food. Did we live in a civilization then? Is that what civilization feels like? What has really changed between then and now?

So why talk about it? It's unspeakable. A former colleague happened to be on a walk to their house, which passed through an encampment of people living in tents. My colleague was on camera on a group call, and they flipped it to show the encampment. Not to say anything, just, I think, because they were adjusting their jacket. The call fell silent. Someone said, "Uh," as if to wonder why this was on screen. But, no one said anything else. It was akward. We moved on. What am I supposed to say? Ah, yes, there's about a dozen folks living rough within two blocks of me. Sometimes the cops hurt them and steal their stuff. We should probably make sure that doesn't happen because we aren't vicious monsters and we've got it in us to stop vicious monsters, right? Do you think the boss would sign off on that?

I can't talk about genocide at work. Not in Palestine, not on Turtle Island, not of trans people. I have to suck it up because red team means job security for fintech, and red team is two boners up on genocide. Blue team doesn't want to hear about it, except in a pornographic way. It doesn't even feel right telling you about what happened to my mom. Why should you care? Shouldn't you give a fuck without needing to poke your finger into an oozing sore? We'll be coping with this reign of atrocity for geologic eons. My mom is just one person living through the Sixth Extinction. The horrors impending, even already surrounding us, approach the unimaginable. Specific human beings turned August into a season of ash. Their names and addresses are like illegal numbers.

For some folks, it's a spectacle. The whole struggle is a big show for them to eat with popcorn. You can even be an earnest radical on camera so long as you mind the censors and voyeurs. The hand wants to make us suffer; the eye wants to watch. I watched CNN eat my dad's brain until any remote suggestion of social compassion earned the reply, "You know, they tried that in Russia." I have even encountered self-identified leftists who do not realize that the Soviet Union fell almost forty years ago, whose opposition to Russia today is somehow linked to anticommunism. Natalie Wynn says we live in an age of spectacle but it has no substance. The hell on TV is coming to your door.

You are watching everything that is already broken, break.

...

Are you afraid now? Really, truly afraid? We see the shape war takes today: drones and mines and slaughter. You see a way of things coming undone. Every compromise you have made with your values, for warmth, for rest, for comfort, for ambition -- it all seems at risk. And for what? Every election is the most important hostage situation of your life, and it's a great racket to launder the savings of the eldery and confused. The demon has two hands, and two eyes, and two shoes, but only one face: with your first step into the halls of power, you kneel to the legitimacy of a heinous curse. How does it surprise you that injustice prevails when it is the fabric of your circumstances? The ground itself must be turned over, and that should scare you.

Society is a thing we do for each other, and the work of it is being prevented. Insurance is not healthcare but its illusion, its privation. The price of food necessitates starvation. Police clock overtime on the public dime just to disappear the unhoused. Accept the hard truth! We feed us. We heal us. We house us. We protect us. We do it, or no one does. And everywhere that this is not true, where it seems some benign institution does it, do their ranks not dwindle? Civilizations don't end in a day, but everyone who can is looking at the exits. What will we do when faith is lost, and only you, me, the land, and the killer remain?

Sit with the weight and terror. You have all your life.

...

What does it mean when the darling of the electoralist left spends an election cycle repping a nerve-stapled dead man? What kind of independent power does that demonstrate? Does it demonstrate no power? Organizers invite you to get involved in the work of providing for each other, sustaining each other, lifting each other, but they are still pointing to small organizations fighting small battles against the nebulous miasma of a suffocating superstructure. Those battles save lives; they matter. But, what is the path from them to a world worth living in? Worth living for? Does it mean anything that we are all shying from that question because it is dangerous to ask?

Consider blue team, the big-tent illusion that will dessicate your passion and potency by dangling minor concessions. We rationalize that complicity is the only path to impact, but that impact is never enough. It is always too little too late and no matter how I phonebank, I still walk past corpses on freezing days. Surrogates faithfully divert critique regarding genocide with platitudes about "kitchen table issues" as if our immiseration had no connection to the weapons we sell to genocidal settlers. The powerful take our everything and turn it into death. They pad bunkers and wonder if the bomb collars on their loyal praetoriat will buy enough obedience to let them die in their sleep. The richest rapists in the world dictate the behavior of the Great Satan, yet we are still waiting for any of them to take meaningful responsibility for the power they have seized. Will you admit that you already know they never will? Will you confront dire necessities, or will you shrink from the thought?

Blue team believes in nothing. Do you see it when they ask, what should we believe in order to win elections? This nihilism of peer pressure nullifies purpose and drive. Objective-free, nothing changes. How does it surprise you that they squander power when they have it? Their purpose is to defuse dissent, and they always blame the dissenters for their own failures. Trans people lost Harris the presidency, or so the commentariat concludes. Therefore, we must be purged. Is this the institution you choose to believe in? Red team knows what power is, and how to use it. Since the days we called it Christendom, the pale devil has been an old hand at exerting cruelty. The teams' struggle for dominance is a damn fiction and you know it. Together they are an essential chemistry of one imperial project.

From poisoning the water, to poisoning the air, to poisoning our food, to having its hand deep in puppets and genocides around the world -- how can I begin to reconcile compassionate beliefs with this font of industrialized evil? But one must reconcile them or speak sedition. When the only path to impact is complicity, one finds many reasons to internalize patriotism. Pundits chide militants because revolution means violence, because change hurts, because the violence that prevails today is bearable to them. How many friends of theirs has it killed? How many lives have they watched it destroy? The question is not whether to revolt, but whether you will live up to your values by standing with the war against capital and colony, the war that never ended. If we oppose genocide, then the genocidaire must be stopped, his tools destroyed. That is the only real path to peace, and empires will resist it bitterly.

How can the United States become something that won't resist that struggle for justice? Platitudes of freedom and equality are inverted to defend a regime predicated on slave labor and colonial extraction. Will you recognize the scale of the transformation we require?

Can you?

...

Deep in the gullet of despair glimmers inherent dignity. The pain that makes you suicidal is the shadow of the love that you know we all deserve. Seize the glimmer and show me a militant compassion.

What does it mean to turn over the ground of the imperial core? Would I still go to work? What happens to rich people? I want to explain, by focusing on the land relation.

Colonialism relies on extraction. The pillaged wealth is transformed into goods by industrial processes, and the measure of those goods is how much people can be forced to pay for them. The likes of Elon Musk can be disarmed, his assets seized. Then he's just another failson. But once those assets are ours, what do we do with them? What do they represent, and to who? The basis of that wealth was drawn from stolen land. While we are merely dividing plunder, we cannot pretend to hold higher ethics than the pillager.

What would it look like to reform this basis of wealth? That is a big question, and it isn't up to me. It's up to all of us, in a way. This is an opportunity to remember that we don't have to do things like this. Rent, pollution, wages, plastic, even the price of food can be replaced with new networks of practices and institutions. On Turtle Island where I live, indigenous traditions have significant, practical insights for a transformative era, both through history and living strength. Still, there are many hands responsible for that basis here, such as it is today. Discerning how to form a just and representative council, and what decisions it must reach, are fundamental to our collective future in the Americas, yet, they feel like distant questions, ones we may never live to answer. Sometimes one must pave the way for another to walk.

The revolution begins in your heart, in the unbreakable home of inherent dignity. Nothing can quell it there. A compassionate world is a way of life as much as a global society, and we can choose to pursue that way of life, to articulate and exert it through reflection and action. We can choose to seek out those who might answer our questions, and listen when they choose to speak. We can build the sort of trust that becomes motion and muscle in crisis. We can show up for each other, and for ourselves. We are in this together, and all our differences remain our strength. Every advantage bestowed through privilege can be turned, to make the kyriarchy regret its brittle heirarchy. We all have agency that nothing can destroy.

More than what one dies for, can you live for what you hold dear?