I found her on account of she bought the same solar generator I’m buying, and she tested it by making a big budget pot of chili with it, which helped me decide.

Why am I choosing full-time nomadic life? Why haven’t I left yet?

I’m posting her for you today because she is the America I know in my bones, the kind of American that never sees air time, the kind of Midwestern American that Clintons find so deplorable.

She’s the living face of a “health care system” that is run for profit like everything else here is.

She’s the embodiment of everything that’s wrong with what this society does to average people.

If you think all this is her fault, the result of poor judgment or lack of intelligence or inferior character, I don’t want to talk to you. Because even though those things are almost certainly true in part, what do they fucking matter?

As you treat the least of these … remember that one?

Reacting to her story by coming up with grand theories about her failings is still victim-blaming.

You and I have it better than she does, and we have for a very long time. I know a lot of cats lately who have it better than she ever has in her life.

Of course I’m in no position to go around inviting stray mothers in, and the truth is that even if I was, I still wouldn’t, and: I don’t need to tell you why.

It’s just not instinctive, for those with a small margin of comfort, to put that margin at risk by taking on the responsibility of broken people, no matter how innocent, no matter how promising they might be. And that is doubly true living in the Empire.

Instead we comfort ourselves, through judicious charity funneled into organizations that seem legit, maybe by voting for the lesser of evils. By counting on the power of magical thinking to pull back a little hope into range of our hearts, while Rome burns hotter and hotter around us.

By offering remote sympathy that might even struggle to become empathy on a few rare occasions, which is all I’m really doing by spilling this today.