God's Not Here, Man
Funding cuts from Reagan remind us state trauma never ends
I’ve been struggling with what to write in this whirlwind of existence, particularly the last 73 days living in the United States. Many things weigh heavy on my mind and my heart, as I’m sure you understand. Each day delivers more cruelty and death than the last, but my days these past few weeks also include more faith in humanity, because there are always ordinary people working to keep humanity from total collapse.
Y’all think you’re tired and scared, now? Wait until these ghouslish motherfuckers have the budget proposals for 2026 in their hands the end of this year (all written in Signal texts, to avoid those pesky FOIA trails.) It’s going to get very whole-ass-history-book-chapter bad.
Picture it, America, next year:
Federal and state local service offices and many nonprofits will be shut down. Every existing government agency website chatbot (trained on Twitter) will tell you to contact the 888 number if you’re a social parasite who needs help, and the 888 number voice AI (sponsored by Red Bull) will tell you to go to the website if you have wings of patriotic resiliency. It will take 12 layers into automated options and 45 human clicks on the keypad to get this helpful information.
The waitlist to speak with a human customer service agent is 3-6 weeks—you have no choice—you hit the corresponding keypad to be put on the list. The Red Bull sponsored AI informs you the waitlist is permanently closed. The calls disconnects.
You read in a headline that the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) has been declared a “homeland securite risk.” The typo is what finally sends you over the edge.
Most of that is already happening, but the details aren’t the point. The point is that in the next 12 months, you will feel insane; you will question the nature of your reality; you will feel frozen in time, watching the world burn.
If you believe, you will ask where God is in all of this. My old activist friend, Sammy, says, “God’s not here, man. But we are.”
I met Sammy at Occupy Wall Street in 2011. Like kindred flames tend to do, we found each other in a crowd of several thousand, by the People’s Library. A few stacks of books fell near an elder protestor organizing a table. Several nearby folks helped the books off the ground, but only Sammy and I lingered to assist a little extra.
We tallied books we had read and wanted to read, followed by that awkward moment where you decide if you want to keep talking to a cute smiling stranger, or part ways. He extended his hand.
“I’m Sammy, from California.”
“I’m Laura, here from Georgia. Born in California.”
We went on to discover we’d been born in the same summer, and while not the same hospital, both multi-generational Los Angeles County babies. And then, we realized what made us kindred spirits: we were both casualty children from the 30% cuts Ronald Reagan made to the HHS Child and Family Services budget between 1981 and 1983.
Sammy and I both entered California’s Child Protective Services system in the early ‘80s, and we remained wards of the state (in my case, multiple states) for most of the first decade of our childhood; I wasn’t adopted out of the system until I was 8 years old. While other kids were learning how to manage their emotions and read, Sammy and I were lost in an abusive system, learning how to manage survival in a cold, bureaucratic world.
Both of us found politics and activism at young ages, opting to funnel our trauma and anger into action for change. We shared a love of '60s and '70s political songs, and a repulsion of anything related to Dick Cheney. If life were a Hallmark movie, Sammy and I would have fallen madly in love and moved to an undisclosed seaside hilltop somewhere that didn’t have extradition to the US.
We did something better, we fell deeply into communion as passion friends. Our passion: FUCK THIS SYSTEM WITH SOMETHING HARD AND SANDPAPERY.
Sammy and I stayed in contact and joined forces again for the NATO Summit in Chicago the spring, where he got a black eye and I got a hairline fracture on my forearm. He went off to the G8 in Ireland the next year, while I headed to protests in Bahrain. Every now and then he visited me in Atlanta, popping in unexpectedly to my trivia show or a fundraiser, where he’d drop a cheek-kiss, and a $20 in the bucket. I visited him once in California and he came down to New Orleans to see me about a year before the pandemic, which was the last we’ve seen each other.
The last time, period.
Sammy had complications post Covid that he believed were long covid damage, and he wasn’t able to get the health access he needed to help manage his symptoms and pain. He was use to mental toughness, but the daily physical pain, he couldn’t handle that.
We would joke that my trauma weighed my body down and his prevented him from sitting still, until he became chronically ill, and always being on the go stopped being an option. Life slows down with illness, priorities demand shifting, and those demands can reach a breaking point without proper, professional assistance.
But this is ‘Merica.
Sammy is dead.
Ended his life about three weeks ago.
I can’t talk about it because I’m too angry, and I’m too angry not to write about it.
Since the election, I’ve been telling friends that we have to prepare for heavy losses because in times like these more and more good people will die, and the evil trolls cosplaying leaders just keep on living. We have to figure out how to take immense grief and do something with it. That’s all we can control.
The world is how it is, and we have to find our way through it. We have to make a path together through the destruction. That’s life.
It’s really fucking hard more days than it’s not. Why? Who knows. But I do know my life isn’t really fucking hard because of queer or trans people, or black or brown people, or immigrants, or other women seeking healthcare, or other Jews against genocide, or Trump supporters living somewhere off a dirt road in south Missouri (some of whom I’m related to.)
Sammy isn’t dead because of gender neutral fucking bathrooms or the birth rate. Or CRT, or Hamas, or abortion, or the fact that no one wants to fuck all these ugly on the outside and heinous on the inside nethanderals.
No, that ain’t it.
Sammy’s dead because this country cuts critical funding and pretends the damage doesn’t last a lifetime. And when the bodies pile up, decade after decades, generation after generation, we blame the dead for being weak, or selfish, or not working hard enough to achieve the fictional American Dream that crumbles behind the Emperor with no clothes.
And Sammy’s dead because insecure men are profiting from convincing other men to bottle up even more than usual, to eat all the pain and shame. Never telling anyone about that itchy problem that’s slowly driving them over the edge. Nope, can’t talk about that. This system needs our men isolated and violent.
I am so tired of America.
God’s not here, man…
But we are.
And on Saturday, I’ll be doing exactly what Sammy would want me to do—gather in mass and exercise our constitutional rights, because it’s our ruling class that’s weak, lazy and worthless. They wouldn’t last a day in the life Sammy and I survived as Reagan system kids. They wouldn’t last a day in one of our lives now.
FUCK
THESE
GHOULS.
