The Time is Now!
From the front-lines of Chipocalypse.
General News
I’m going to have to start with the local news this week. Recent events aren’t looking great. It’s wild to me that we’re expected to normalize this kind of shit. Despite this, there really aren’t any consequences. As if things weren’t hard enough on the working class, from the endless inflated cost of living to the shrinking job market. We’re looking at a pretty terrible economy. If you are looking for ways to help your neighbors, I highly recommend getting involved in your local mutual aid groups and ICE watch groups. I’ll share this link for my Chicago subscribers. And for anyone anywhere: Please follow this link to fight for HIV-program funding. Really crazy how the MAHA crowd wants everyone to die. Speaking of Florida, they never cease to amaze me down there. And then there’s this, which is just the icing on the cake. Arm the trannies now, for fuck’s sake.
I’d like to do a semi-deep dive into Abundance. Not necessarily a shallow dive, but like a cautious dive into an area of water that you’re unsure of how deep it is because water makes rocks look a lot bigger than they are. Back in June, I attended a talk with the former mayor of Redwood City in California on abundance and housing policy. To be honest, I hadn’t heard of Abundance before. I thought that the talk would present a good opportunity to deepen my perspective on housing policy, since I’ve been working in social services for over four years (happy anniversary to me). Over the years, I have sharpened my opinion of market and subsidized housing and developed the opinion that social housing is the best option for providing housing to people. I was hoping that the talk would lead somewhere into that territory. After all, that would be the most abundant option. It did not go in the direction I had hoped.
To start, Hale used the conservative analogy of Musical Chairs to describe the housing crisis. Everyone has a chair until one chair is taken away. One side of the aisle could say, “They should just build themselves another chair!” Perhaps another side may say, “Now you all must share chairs!” Abundance, however, promises, “Enough chairs for everyone!” How? Just Build More Chairs! If you increase supply, you can just meet the demand! Right? Well, sure, if that’s how free markets actually worked in the real world. The theory that the “invisible hand” of capitalism will just correct the market itself if you just “make more things” hasn’t ever worked out in practice. Instead, we’ve developed a monopoly market, where multi-million-dollar corporations and investors buy out the market and price their competitors out. Once ownership is consolidated into the hands of a few, they can inflate prices against one another in order to beat each other out on profits. This is what has happened to housing since 2008–after the Obama Administration bailed out the banks, real-estate companies realized that investors can provide better financial support than the government. Basically, private equity can just buy stock in real-estate which inflates the cost of property and drives the market up every year. This is why your landlord charges you more and more in rent each year.
The problem really isn’t supply, it’s the cost. First of all, we already have more empty units in most major cities than people experiencing homelessness. If we already have the supply, what’s going on here? Affordability is, obviously, the issue. And nobody wants to make housing affordable in this damned country because housing is a means through which one builds equity. So long as commodified housing exists, people who cannot afford the commodity will continue to exist. The market perpetuates homelessness, it’s just a fact. Marx and Engles were literally saying this in the late nineteenth century! Abundance does not solve this issue, for it still relies on markets and investments; its philosophy is rooted in the Classical Liberal Economics of Adam Smith. The market will adjust itself. So, yeah, you can imagine how disappointed I felt when I left that talk in June. Just re-branded trickle-down economics for YIMBYs! Yikes!
During the talk, Hale brought up the Abundance Conference in DC this year, the first of its kind. I checked it out online, curious about perhaps going myself. I ended up not going, but I saw discourse about it on BlueSky last week. After seeing who the speakers and financiers were for this conference, it has become apparent to me that the Democratic Party is on the brink of bursting. Centrist Dems are pushing back against the NYC Mayoral Democratic Candidate, Zohran Mamdani. They are making it clear that they do not want Democratic Socialists in their party. This then begs the question: If they don’t want the left in their party, then who do they want in their party? Well, it looks like they’re making some space for the far-right via Abundance. Vote blue no matter who, right? Anyway, if someone tries to sell you on Abundance, just laugh in their faces. Abundance will not save the Democratic Party. If anything, it will be its very demise.
Personal News
Last year, I made the trip out to see my mom for her birthday, which was not an easy feat. Within the last five years, she moved further outside of the Greater Austin Area, where my siblings and I grew up. I flew into Austin and stayed with my little brother (fellow subscriber, love u). He drove me an hour outside of the city to drop me off at my sister’s place and she drove us another hour out to see my mom. For someone who complains about not being able to see me more often, she really made it a lot harder for me to see her! As long as she can live among other MAGA dorks with their flags and signs, she’s happy.
And that’s kind of the problem that I had this year with giving her a call. Earlier this year, I replied to her via text message outlining how hard things were at the time of the Orange Cumrag’s inauguration. I even opened up to her about how I felt suicidal in 2020 when I was afraid that he’d win a second term. Her response? “OK.” Empathy doesn’t come naturally to her. Never has. I mean, the last time that she and I spoke on the phone was when I was in LA. We were talking about her family (whom lives around the Greater LA Area) and she said some Choice Things that I couldn’t help but push back against. First, it was when she made an unsympathetic (surprise) remark about her sister whom receives Medicaid. It was an ill-informed comment dismissing the impacts of the Orange Cumrag’s Administration. Then, she continued to do the whole “woe is me” bit over the fact that she can’t see her dad because (get this) my grandma won’t let someone unvaccinated enter their home. How cruel! I said to her, “Easy solution, just get the vaccine.”
When did she become such a MAGA dork? There has been a bit of contemporary literature over the past decade on people “losing their family members” to the MAGA “cult.” Well, I didn’t lose anyone to a cult because we already were in a cult. I’m the kind of person who has to intellectualize my suffering, so I’ve been dragging my feet through the 1970 edition of Wilhem Reich’s book The Mass Psychology of Fascism (Farrar, Staus, and Grioux). Though I haven’t finished it yet, it’s illuminated a lot of observations that I’ve made in my own life as a former cult member and informed anti-fascist. For those of you who are new here, here’s the Short Version. My mom was always pretty conspiratorial about modern medicine and agriculture when I was growing up (which, to her credit, is corrupted; but if I say, “Capitalism is the problem,” she’ll argue that capitalism is actually great and we should never complain about it). Before the 2016 election, she was saying stuff like, “If people didn’t want to get shot by police maybe they shouldn’t do something bad.” I don’t think MAGA gave her anything new or took her away from reality; if anything, I think MAGA gave her a home for her deeply warped and fucked up view of reality.
I tried. I really did give a good effort to challenge her beliefs and bring evidence to the table. For that entire first term, I engaged with her ideas and arguments in good faith to no avail. Which brought me to 2020, when I decided that I needed to be estranged from her. I didn’t speak to her for 3 years. Fast-forward to last week, when I was on the phone with my little brother. Not to get too far into it, but he chooses to not have a relationship with either of our parents. Honestly, I really don’t blame him. It’s not just about the politics, but the severe lack of empathy and disconnect from reality that makes it near impossible to have a normal conversation with them. As he was describing to me the ways in which he copes with our parents’ absence in his life, he said to me, “When all of this is over, what are the people like that left with?” It was then when I decided that I would in fact make the continued effort to remind my mom that I love her (to which he said, “Oh, that’s what you took away? Oops.” LOL).
I say all of this not to air out my family’s deranged laundry online, but to articulate a kind of compassion that we need in times of division. The best way to help people who are in cults is to not remind them that they’re in a cult (which, to them, feels like a personal attack), but to remind them that you’re on the other side of the moat cheering them on to get back across to reality. Everyone should know that they are loved. Except for actual cops and federal agents working for the Orange Cumrag. They don’t deserve love or compassion. Straight to the gulags, you know? Anyway, I just keep telling myself that the love I want exists because I am full of it. The love that I put into the world will return to me one-hundred fold.
Poetry
Speaking of difficult mothers, this poem hits me like a goddamned gut-punch. I often think about the final line. After being introduced to Gail Mazur’s work, she was partially influential in my decision to attend graduate school in Boston. She’s a Masshole through-and-through, born in Cambridge in 1937, raised in Auburndale, and educated at Smith College. Despite having lived and taught in various cities across the United States, she has spent the majority of her life and career in Massive-Two-Shits. From the Poetry Foundation’s bio on her: “In 1973, Mazur founded the Blacksmith House Poetry Series in Harvard Square; she directed the series for 29 years. As an activist with her late husband—the artist Michael Mazur—and others, she cofounded, in 1968, Artists Against Racism and the War, and later they were activists for a Nuclear Freeze. Blacksmith House became, with its weekly readings, a center of poetry life, bringing national and international writers to read in a lively informal atmosphere. Blacksmith House has presented benefit readings for, among other issues, the fight for AIDS research.”
She spent two decades as a writer-in-residence at Emerson College and taught up until retirement at Boston University. I considered applying to BU to learn from her back when I was applying for MFA programs. Her work has been very inspiring to me over the past several years. Fun fact: She signed my copy of this book when I met her at the Blacksmith House in Cambridge. She was very sweet. She makes me think a lot about empathy for my mother.
P.S.
Chicago rules. Best American City. Stay mad.
