A friend of mine once told me he doesn’t do politics…
“You may not fuck with politics,” I told him, “but politics will always fuck with you.”
The Deep South is a collision of Elizabethan-era English settlers, those same Scots-Irish backcountry families, and, critically, the enslaved Africans who often did the actual day to day raising of white Southern children, which means the roots of the Southern drawl run directly through those relationships whether that gets acknowledged
who watches the people who can search the watchers.
Because that’s the part of this conversation that gets lost when we reduce everything to “it’s just a camera.” It isn’t just a camera anymore. It’s a camera connected to a database. The database is connected to a network. The network
When someone compares something happening today to 1984 or The Handmaid’s Tale, there is almost always someone ready to respond that’s ridiculous, America isn’t Gilead. No, it isn’t. That’s not the point. Dystopian fiction isn’t a checklist where we have to reach 100 percent similarity before we’re allowed to be
Progress isn’t a permanent state. It’s a maintenance project. Every generation inherits the responsibility to protect what got fought for and to keep expanding it, because the moment we treat these rights as settled is the moment somebody starts quietly writing the memo that unsettles them.
We didn’t get here
The machine doesn’t need your name on a list to come for you. It just needs a door wide enough, and a public quiet enough to let it stay open.
I’d rather be loud.
My first thought, watching it happen, wasn’t just about the politics of immigration at all. It was: who owns that building, and what do they get out of this. This felt too familiar, just with different packaging.
So: if you can’t own a home, can’t afford an apartment, and now can’t afford one of the last cheap manufactured lots in the state either — where do you go. Where do you live.
And then, when the only place left is your car, they write a law to
This was never about giving land back to “the people.” It was about which people get asked, and which people find out after the fact, the same way you did, reading this.
The wheels of justice move slow. The damage doesn’t wait on the courts. The mining claims file at
So the next time you pass someone on a corner holding a sign, sitting with a dog, existing somewhere that makes you uncomfortable, I want you to think about this. Think about six years. Think about 140 pages faxed after the hearing. Think about a judge who had time for
