What is worth a life?

I’m eight years old in the living room under the bright but grainy glow of a TV bustling with words on an entertainment channel about foreigners stealing our tax dollars and jobs. My idiot father is hanging onto every word like it’s Sunday morning gospel. Brainwashed. I can’t help but hang onto these idiocracies like a ringing reminder of what’s wrong. Now more than ever, I am left thinking about how I have worked 65-90 hours a week since I was seventeen years old just to split rent with three people in order to stay afloat. Gasping for air. Holding onto my dignity as if it were a rough rope in the cliche gymnasium, cutting my palms in tiny sharps, the blood on my hands furthering my slip down the thick nylon braids.

No fun dorm room stories. No exciting European travel in my twenties. Only knowing what it is like to have less than $2.90 in your bank account. Only the desperation you feel to scrape through 24 hours at a time. How will I eat today? Fuck, I am out of toilet paper. I have to figure out how to get to work. Bus fare is $2.90, but I have $1.37 in my account and it costs me zero dollars to hop the turnstile. Maybe I will make enough tips to feed myself tomorrow if I jump. And yet, I’m still considerably one of the lucky—the privileged.

“Public Safety Facilities” is the repeated euphemism for the seventy and counting police training sites (you may know them as Cop City). It’s no groundbreaking recognition that police provide zero public safety, let alone a sense of protection to the people they say they serve. Militant policing of who pays and does not at a turnstile is revealed in its truth:endangering bystanders, one of their own, and in return the whole nation. I’d like to think this woke some people up but I know better. Chalk it up to another buzz worthy post for liberals to share on their instagram stories without thinking about the blatant disregard for human life at the cost of America’s tax dollars. Death piles upon death and it feels like we’re all screaming into a government sanctioned void while they observe and enjoy the tastes of their stolen fruit.

Tax dollars from all of our 5am wake up calls for job number one blending into our server’s end of shift report at 11:48pm, our drooling tasks that tell us we’ll get that next meal and dig ourselves out of an all consuming hole, down to the hard-earned money we spend on baby formula at CVS: it all goes back to funding these military training camps that police civilians, the invasion of foreign countries to steal their resources, and a full on genocide at the hands of the israeli government—puppeteered by the American. You are not exempt.