WCID: Feed the people

Millions of Americans are at risk of losing their SNAP benefits in November.

If that’s all you need to know, and you’re ready to feed your neighbors right now, hit the button below.

To be clear on exactly where I stand on this issue, and all the fuckery that has made it a reality, read on.

First, let me clear the air.

Once upon a time, a reader called our work “extraordinarily biased”, and I stand by that.

To reiterate:

So here’s what I need you to understand: the people currently in charge of the United States of America — the people who have cut food assistance, dismantled healthcare protections, are rolling back environmental safeguards — clearly do not care whether people live or die.

Not people in this country or in another, here inside our borders legally or not, born here or not, straight or not (but especially not), white or not (but especially not).

Maybe you’re not here for this content. Maybe it’s not what you thought you subscribed to.

But it doesn’t behoove any of us to operate under any sort of preconceived notions about how our system used to work, because it’s ashes now. It just is. This is more than ever a time to focus on what you can control, and you cannot go back in time and resurrect these institutions and norms. You can only care for each other.

The people who were elected and the people they appointed made their intentions clear two years ago — they wrote them down. They promised to act, catastrophically and with impunity, gambling that democratic tradition and the rule of law wouldn’t stand in the way of returning America to a time when we did one thing and one thing better than almost any nation in history: cruelty.

Where once there was a Justice Department, a Congress, and a Supreme Court to offer at least some threat of checks and balances to executive power, there are none any longer. Ashes.

“Who watches the watchmen?” Nobody, it turns out.

For a few months this year there was a Congress that you and I may have naively imagined might reinforce norms or at least protect their own constitutional powers, but not only did they never do that, not once, they have actually quit working entirely.

If you think this sequence is accidental, you are wrong.

How did we get here? On one hand, you can realistically argue that — according to the rules of the game, set by the Supreme Court, and funded by the twice-Hitler-saluting richest man alive — Trump won everywhere, and winning everywhere isn’t king-making.

Because isn’t someone who wins the most votes, popular and electoral, just a democratically elected official?

But it doesn’t matter how we got here. We — people who give a shit — lost, and now every backup plan is ashes.

On the other hand, because they wrote all of their plans down ahead of time and because they’re so successfully following them to the letter, with no checks and balances of any kind, it does require actually saying out loud that at this point, he is effectively a king.

He is an authoritarian tyrant who respects only one American precedent, and our longest-lasting: the cruelty America is capable of, and the profits reaped from it.

He unleashed white supremacist Christian nationalists who begged for a chance to bury the American dream forever, out in the open again, to do as they please, to enrich themselves, to build their own masked secret police, to steal children from their beds and families, to demand fealty from higher education, and to systematically dismantle racial progress, reproductive and civil rights, and personal and public health infrastructure at every level.

Let the heat come, let the oceans rise, let the people starve, drill baby drill.

They want all the money, and they want absolute control. They hate the poor and in 2025, everyone but them is getting more poor every day. Everything is going to plan.

Authoritarians from within may be new to America, but the cruelty we are capable of is not. To make America great again — yes, that America — they just need a few years to dismantle everything we built, against all odds, to even begin to make up for that America.

They are fundamentally dismantling those protections brick by brick, law by law — and after they’ve made enough progress, you’d better believe me that all bets are off.

I do not relish bringing you this news, but it shouldn’t be a shock. If it is a shock, it’s time to get over it, to reach down and sift through the ashes and pull each other the fuck out. We have to build anew, if we get the chance, and I’ll never ever stop fighting for that chance, but in the meantime, we absolutely have to care for one another.

We are in this together more than ever before. We are all that we have, and I think the more we say it out loud, the more resilient we can be.

I want to conclude by sharing a quote from a Terry Pratchett novel that I’ve carried with me for a long time, and one I reach for frequently these days. I want you to have it, too, amid everything else that feels so horrid, and hateful, and out of our control.

So I have just one action for you today: feed each other.

Millions of people — families and service members and our neighbors among them — are going to lose access to SNAP in the days to come. The only way for them to get food is if we feed them our goddamn selves.

There is just us.

Let’s feed people.

Find local food banks, mutual aid networks, and community fridges. Donate money or time. Organize meal shares. Stock the free pantries in your neighborhood. Show up.

That’s it. It was a lot.

Thank you — as always, and more than ever — for giving a shit.

— Quinn