It Was Never About Our Neighbors
We are told a story. A story where survival must be earned. Where poverty is a personal failing. Where needing help makes you weak.
But the forest does not believe this. The mycelium does not hoard resources from the dying trees. The river does not ask the thirsty to prove their worth before it gives them water. The earth knows what they want us to forget is that survival is always collective. That care is life itself.
Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security were a fragile but vital recognition of this truth. But now, they are being dismantled. Not because they don’t work, but because they do. Because care is dangerous to those who rely on scarcity to keep us divided.
The Republican plan to do away with Medicaid isn’t about balancing the national budget. It’s about deciding who deserves to live through reforms set up in the playbook of Project 2025. They know full well that people will die, and that is the point. In their worldview, if you aren’t producing, you are worthless. If you are poor, sick, elderly, or disabled, your survival is not a right but a privilege that must be earned. This is the logic of authoritarianism. And it has been shaping American politics for decades, and it’s just one chapter in a much older story. The idea that some lives matter more than others has existed under many names, cloaked in religion, economics, and nationalism.
But that’s a story for another time.
Right now, that story is unfolding in the rise of authoritarianism, oligarchy, and nationalism in the United States, and at this moment, through the Republican budget and their assault on Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security. These programs serve the same purpose through different channels: they are the last remaining safeguards against an economic system that treats human survival as a privilege, not a right.
Of the three, Medicaid is the most vulnerable because it serves the poor, the disabled, the elderly, and those without power. And that is exactly why it’s being dismantled first.
Medicaid is the recognition that we are not isolated beings but part of an interconnected web of care. When we cut these programs, we sever the threads that hold communities together.
We do harm. We take lives. We decide who is worthy of care, of life, of wellbeing.
On Political Parties
Personally I’ve never voted for a candidate I’ve liked. Not once. I vote as part of civic duty, but it’s never pleasant. I despise our two-party system and am hyper-critical of the person I end up voting for. Are they doing what they said? Are they hurting others for political and monetary gain? (Almost always yes) You’ll never catch me wearing the “colors” of the party I voted for. Because this isn’t a football game, it isn’t a revenge tactic; it’s the health, happiness, and life of my family, my neighbors, myself, and the Earth.
I choose a candidate based on how much harm they’ll prevent to the disabled, the poor, the sick, the elderly, the Earth. Not by the might they’ll flex but by the empathetic reforms they’ll enact.
I'm not Christian, but I grew up with deep Christian ethics, and those ethics have shaped me. I’ve read the Bible several times, front to back. And I know the words and teachings of Jesus well. And for the life of me, I cannot fathom Christ choosing “vengeance against the libs” as a reason to blindly follow men in power who are directly harming the people Jesus said plainly to protect. There are reasons for this, and one of them is the authoritarian merit-based culture and society in which Americans often grow up.
Why Humans Vote Against Our Own Interests
History books are filled with stories of populations that voted against their own interests. As an anthropologist, I understand the dynamics. There are those who were raised in authoritarian homes, churches, and schools, all within a national system big on punishment and intolerant of empathy.
I understand the way this shapes brains and the size of our amygdala.
I understand the way these upbringings taught us it wasn’t safe to be empathetic and that the only way to survive was to see anyone not like us as the enemy, and to blame everyone else for the problems we are experiencing.
I understand that this has a percentage of the population raging against unelected bureaucrats while cheering on a billionaire unelected bureaucrat who happens to stand to gain immeasurably from the offices he’s cutting all because he’s somehow going to root out the neighbor that’s somehow making our lives miserable.
Why do people cheer for policies that will leave them, their families, and their communities without healthcare? Because for decades, they’ve been told a story that explains their own suffering.
A story where survival must be earned.
A story of boot straps and stiff upper lips.
A story of poverty as personal failure.
A story where empathy is for the weak.
A story where needing help makes you pathetic.
These are lies.
It’s the opposite of every major religious teaching, and the opposite of how humanity has succeeded throughout time. The truth is, we thrive through community, connection, and solidarity. We thrive through belonging, empathy, and togetherness. The truth is we don’t need to prove our worth just to survive. When a child is born, the parents (hopefully) don’t gaze at them and think, “I hope you earn your place in this world.”
That is not how life works.
But these lies are the ideological backbone of an authoritarian merit-based worldview. And authoritarianism doesn’t just control resources. It controls the truth. And that is why those in power don’t need to govern well. They just need to own the narrative and make you believe the story.
The authoritarian worldview teaches us that survival is earned, that we stand alone, that we must prove our worth to deserve care. But this is a lie. No one survives alone.
No one.
The truth, one we see clearly in nature, in ecosystems, in history, is that survival is always collective. Without fail. And that is exactly why they dismantle these systems: because they threaten the illusion of self-reliance that keeps us divided.
It Isn’t Our Neighbors
It isn’t our neighbors that are taking from us. It never has been. I don’t want to come right out and say that Republicans have never worked in the interest of the people because there are a few exceptions. But primarily, over the course of our history, Republicans have been responsible for cutting the programs that keep people alive in an economic system that keeps money in the hands of a few, for removing protections for the land, removing consumer protections that keep us safe, eroding workers rights, keeping minimum wages low, and working steadily toward limiting democracy itself.
For decades, this same party has branded itself as the party of common sense, Apple Pie, Football, Farms, and Veterans. They drape themselves in the imagery of small-town America while systematically gutting the very programs that keep those communities alive.
And I say this as someone who is not a Democrat and who does not condone the actions of Democrats that harm. But if we were to weigh it out on the scales, Republicans tip them heavily.
They claim to be the party of working Americans, yet they fight to keep wages low, weaken unions, and strip away labor protections.
They claim to stand for freedom, yet their policies consistently restrict democracy, making it harder for ordinary people to vote, organize, and have a say in their own government.
So why do they keep winning?
Because they control the narrative.
Republicans don’t have to improve people’s lives; they just have to own the story. They have mastered resentment politics, redirecting the anger of struggling Americans away from billionaires and corporations and toward immigrants, Black and brown communities, and big government. They’ll tell struggling white workers that their real enemy is not the CEO hoarding wealth, but the single mother on food stamps, or the trans population (about .5% of the population!), or communists (.0045% of the population!), or abortion, which was never a political issue until they needed it to be.
But here is the reality: Loving your country means making sure its people can live—all of its people, with all of their different colors and voices and ideas, with their different talents, foibles, and mistakes. It means fair wages for workers, real support for veterans, and policies that help farmers thrive, not just corporate agribusiness. It means recognizing that the problem was never our neighbors. It was always the people in power, selling us a story while stripping us of everything that makes life livable.
Project 2025 Won’t Usher Us Into a Golden Age.
It can’t. Even if you believe a nation should be built on theocratic rule that forces others to live the way you worship (this isn’t faith btw; it’s fascism).
It won’t.
It will fail.
Life will get harder.
For you.
For me.
For everyone except those at the top who hoard the resources.
Corporations will flourish.
The wealthy elite will flourish.
Some men will flourish.
But the nation, and we the people are this nation, will not.
So we have a choice. We can let them convince us that our neighbors are the enemy, or we can see the truth: That we are being robbed while they tell us to fight each other.
We have a choice to see other human beings as part of this vast, interconnected existence or as the enemy. But our choices matter.
Because when they finish cutting what’s left, it won’t just be the poor who suffer.
It will be all of us.
A Thread of Hope: The Future is Mycelium
The forest does not abandon its wounded. It does not cut off its dying branches and tell them to fend for themselves. It recycles, repurposes, nourishes, and shares. The trees do not survive alone; their roots intertwine, breathing nutrients to one another in the dark.
And if we listen, if we remember, if we reach for each other like the roots beneath the soil, then no matter how many times they try to rewrite the story, we will always find our way back to the truth.
