I believe every person is a poem written by God. The people in charge right now have no appreciation for poetry.
We’re all poems. We’re all music and dance; we’re all art. Jeff Bezos is art, but so is my friend Willie who repeated everything I said back to me with a smile because he needed extra help with social communication. J. D. Vance is art, but so is my friend Deonte who was sitting in the cool down room because he’d been through 3 foster homes—one of them a group home, by God—in the past 3 years and no, staying seated in his chair was not at the top of his list of priorities when he hadn’t had his mood stabilizer that morning. Donald Trump himself is even art, but so was my friend Sariah who had an alphabet soup of diagnoses at the age of 14 and was having a very loud and angry conversation with God about how she was pregnant and couldn’t handle it in the bathroom, so loud that the two other girls who had been in there vaping ran straight past security and out the back doors of the school.
I don’t know how to talk about this without sounding like some sort of Christian asshole. This language is co-opted all the time by people who protect the rights of fetii over grown women, and I hate that. If you have your own children, or have loved other people’s children with any depth, you know in your bones it’s true. You know that DNA has a soul and that the world aches with beauty, and these assholes take that idea from you and use it to hold individual women accountable for their biology’s mistakes.
Meanwhile, these same people are talking about fiscal responsibility and how important it is to tighten the national budget in the name of discipline. Collectively, we can understand. We know that there are some months we just can’t afford a new iPhone. We know that bills come out of our income, and if we want a better income then we need another job or we just need to make do.
We are taught from childhood that money implies a choice. And it’s easy to believe that on a national level that we are being too free with our choices and therefore we need to cut back.
But that’s not how government budgets work. Governments print the money. Governments create the numbers that support the programs that keep God’s poems in living, breathing bodies.
When we start looking at our government priorities and choosing which poem gets to be in which body, we start going down a slope that bodes not well for all of us. Not one of us is a perfect poem, and none of us are in perfect bodies. When we start acting from a place of lack, of tightening our belts, of making difficult choices, something’s got to give.
I know that everyone thinks money is real, but it’s really not. It’s not attached to the gold standard any more. Money is just a number assigned a value, and it’s done by banks. It’s a metaphor.
Banks are not some sort of neutral computer. Banks are made up of individual people who make decisions about value and worth. Each dollar is not a piece of paper, each dollar is math. It’s an idea, not an actual object.
The greatest con ever pulled was people with unlimited resources convincing people without resources that this paper token represents something real. This quarter is equal to one gumball, for example. This hundred dollar bill is equal to one month of electricity. But the problem is that the people in power can change the value of the gumball to 35 cents. You can use more electricity in the summer because it’s 90 degrees outside and you’re running an air conditioner in your bedroom window so you can sleep and therefore go to work rested. Your electricity bill is no longer equal to a $100 bill.
Yes, values can shift, and the market determines the prices for goods and services. But no one really talks about who chooses the value of the tokens.
It’s people that you’ve never met–while you’re still trying to buy a gumball for a quarter. They use this ability to determine the value of the tokens in order to manipulate the economy itself. In an ideal world, they do this to encourage growth so there’s more tokens for everyone.
But things have gotten a little off the rails lately.
Congress just passed an absolutely terrible budget bill. There is a legitimate argument that I’ve seen repeated over and over again that it’s just cutting services for poor people in order to give billionaires bigger tax cuts. But I don’t think anyone understands: billionaires have so many resources that the value of the tokens is completely irrelevant. What does adding a billion dollars to $236 billion dollars do? You still have more money than God. You just have more of it.
That value of the token means something completely different to people who rely on the government for health care. These are people for whom even $100 being taken away means they can’t pay for the electricity that month, and for many others it gets even worse.
If these people don’t have the money for health care, they’re not going to go to the doctor. I know this intimately. Moms are going to skip prenatal appointments, young men are going to just live with that hernia for another month and—and this is the one we really have to pay attention to—people are going to skip their psychiatric drugs.
People who skip their psychiatric drugs aren’t predictable. They are confused and sometimes in literal pain. And people in that space have a tendency to not pay very close attention to things. Their impulse control is down, so they may do things that they don’t normally do. And if they’re brown or black and under extra surveillance anyway due to systemic racism, the people in charge are more likely to notice when they do things that aren’t too kosher. And when they get noticed by the people in charge, they’re more likely to be put in a holding cell. And when they can’t defend themselves because they’re mentally and physically disoriented, they go from a holding cell to a detention center.
Do you see where I’m going?
For people with disabilities, if they don’t get their medication, the same things happen. I saw it in special education all of the time. They get put in a holding cell, and if they can’t defend themselves because they can’t put one thought in front of the other, they go from a holding cell to a detention center.
Please, do you understand?
When you have no problem accessing resources, you never know what it’s like to be in that space because all of your needs are being taken care of. Someone at some bank, or someone in some government, decided that for some reason your poem is more important than the poems who do not have $236 billion dollars and can’t afford their electricity this month because they wanted to sleep at night and show up work the next morning.
I don’t know what your poem sounds like. I don’t know what alliteration it has, if it rhymes, if it’s an epic saga about the battles between the gods or a haiku about a soap bubble in the kitchen sink. I don’t know if your music has a meter or if it’s just the reverberation of one hit on a snare drum.
No poems deserve to go away because the cost of paper that they’re written on went up. No music deserves to stop because the closet it’s being made in could be better used for storing toilet paper.
We are not on the right side of history currently. And I will not stand by while poems and sheet music are shredded for fuel.
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