This Ache Has a Name

This is a personal post about the current political situation, with the House passing of the ʻOne Big Beautiful Billʻ as well as the events of the past 5 months. If you click the player above, you can listen to me read this. Alternatively, the video of me reading this is below.

I feel so scared. No, that’s not right. I feel frozen and paralyzed, like that buildup of tension in the back of my throat behind my eyes, my nose. It all feels very sharp and tense and simultaneously, a dull ache, like the ache in my chest. I don’t know what all this means, yet I feel like I need to write down everything that’s shifting, changing, that’s being taken, disappearing. We didn’t have enough to begin with, and now we have even less, and less makes a difference between barely surviving and being crushed.

I feel angry that the capitalistic myths have been perpetuated for so long, and that the myths affect what it feels to be every aspect of our communal life. They shape our education, health care systems. They affect the way we transport ourselves. They affect the way we interact with one another. They go right to the marrow of how we value one another. Our worth is reduced to our productivity, and anyone who can’t keep pace is expendable. We don’t need them, they can die, it’s okay, they have no value, they don’t make us money. And all for what? Money? Material stuff?

This is just one endless quest of getting more stuff and stuff that we’re drowning in, stuff that is polluting our planet, stuff that is killing us and it makes me angry that we’ve all bought into this bullshit – including myself – for so long. That myth that our value is measured in our productivity.

There is such a difference between contributing and feeling that you are a part of something and you are developing and growing, your skills and talents are being tuned in, turned on, and that of simply being a cog in the mill. Just wiping counters at Jack in the Box. You’re not doing something that’s really worth your spirit, your time, your heart, your energy, your care – none of that is true work at all, and the Jack in the Boxes shouldn’t even exist. They feed a system that thrives on exploitation.

It’s all simply about making money for somebody else, and we keep on buying into it because the shame that we’ve been brought up to feel and believe is true, even though nothing could be further from the actual truth. Thinking that we need to pull ourselves up by the bootstraps is this myth that the poor are just lazy people who don’t do anything, don’t try to better themselves, and don’t try to contribute, which is bullshit. The enemy in a capitalistic country is always the person at the lowest point in the totem, never the person at the top because in this capitalist system, we’re all looking at the people on the top thinking that that’s the goal. That’s where we should be and that somehow, they deserve to be there more than anyone else does.

And it’s wrong and it makes me angry and it’s not just and it’s not fair and nothing about this is just or fair and the injustice makes me feel ill, and it makes me want to scream, and it makes me want to cry and then the end it kind of makes me paralyzed.

When I feel like I’ve been feeling this feeling for so long now and it simply gets worse – it gets so overwhelming and consuming and the feeling of being choked. The injustice chokes me when I think about what could’ve been done to prevent all of this from happening. It’s so hard to put my finger on an answer.

Part of what caused where we are now is for many being raised to not think critically, or to really analyze and see systems, to understand what’s beneficial to – and possible for – people. But it’s even deeper than that because with the system being the way that it is, and with our healthcare so very inadequate, mothers and fathers need to leave their babies too soon. Families are torn apart. The need to earn outweighs the need to bond. Without intention, families are fractured because of this lack of time together, and the need to make more money, make more money, always make more money. The kids are sent to school too young, taught obedience instead of curiosity, molded to become compliant workers, fresh cogs for the mill.

This is Not Western Culture

This is Capitalistic Culture, not Western Culture. True Western Culture, the umbrella that holds European cultures, does not ascribe to this productivity/value myth any more than any other native/indigenous culture does. What is going on is not Western Culture; it’s Capitalistic Culture, which emerged out of England during the Industrial Revolution. It has spread all over the world like an infectious parasite, blanketing native cultures and sucking them dry.

What is called “Western Culture” is being mistaken for Capitalistic Culture, because they were the first cultures to be infected by the myth. But go into the roots of any given European culture and you won’t find this. And you couldn’t, because Capitalistic Culture goes against the very nature of us as humans. It goes against connection. It goes against care. It goes against rest, reciprocity, rhythm. It fractures the bonds between people, between families, between communities. It isolates and shames and demands that we measure love in hours billed and value in what can be consumed and produced.

But we know better, don’t we? Deep down, in our bones, we remember. We remember what it feels like to be held without condition. To sit around a table, not to produce, but to be. To take care of one another because in doing so, we become whole.

Itʻs time for us to unlearn and to separate ourselves from this myth.

And in doing so, we will slowly reclaim the ground beneath our feet. We are reminding ourselves and each other that we were never meant to be cogs in someone else’s machine – indeed, the machine was never supposed to exist, nor were we ever meant to be cogs.

We were meant to be human. Whole. Imperfect. Precious. As we are.

And from that knowing, we begin again.