The “final” debate: Vote for ‘him’ and you’ll lose your job, or your health care, or your health…

Wait.

Do we really have all those things now?

In the wake of a pandemic and an economy spluttering on short-term fed meds, we are left contemplating what we might lose ‘if,’ when the reality is we are fighting to restore what has been taken from us. Call this the double cruelty of life today in America: we feel deprived of what we have never received but paid for.

We do not ‘live’ in America. We. inhabit “bought America.” The nation of brands and make believe and ‘being positive.’ Of names on buildings for a price.

The spectacle of family separation and children in cages invoked in tonight’s final debate reminds us of our experience with separation and cages, literally for some, metaphorically for all, which is perhaps why we find these spectacles abhorrent and beneath the radar of the 24 hour news cycle.

We don’t have a job.

We have 2 and 3 jobs, tearing us from family and community. We can’t vote because we don’t have space and time and agency. Are we being paid to stand in line for four hours? This is a serious question.

We don’t have health care.

We have a clinic across town that charges ‘out of pocket’ because we don’t have health insurance or we have fake health insurance because we absorb the financial risk in an ever-advancing deductible.

We don’t have health.

We have a virus, air borne, with no plan for its management less eradication. We live on the ‘front lines,’ breathing toxic air while the hedge fund-owned chemical plant transitions to ‘clean’ energy, whatever that means. We live five plus blocks from a supermarket and one block from a Twinkie stocked convenience store. We live in a double bind world of having food stamps withheld pending proof of employment which is why we need food stamps to eat.

Unemployment like sickness has on-the-job experience.

This is not a life.

This is a sentence in a cage separated from family.

October 22–23