On Being a Defused Bomb.

Many of us, after this election, simply can't help anymore. And that's okay. For now.

A window at the now de-comissioned Nevada State Prison.

The videos I first started seeing first were from Black women.

These women were saying that they worked hard to get the safe white guy (Biden) into office after Trump and that they aren’t helping anymore. This video (below) sums it all up.

They are calling it The We Ain’t Got It Movement. LOL. Love that. Cathartic as hell.

@ykl007_2#voteblue2024💙 #HarrisWalz2024 #fypage

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This is where I am right now, too. Maybe you are, too?

People who read here are generally super active in their communities. When the pandemic hit, we all found areas of need and pitched in.

Our family, as many of you know, created a full-on green market in our front yard, organized people to cook and hand out fresh hot meals and gave out pantry supplies so people could make the best use of the boxes of food they were handed at pantries. In the process, we forged a whole community on FB that gave people access to other food drives, instructed people how to sign up for eviction protection, gave out Target gift cards at Christmas and perhaps most importantly, provided support and a social capital-base life-line for folks going through it alone. 

And that was nothing. People in other places created bigger and badder service programs to step in and help people before there were even relief checks being sent out. Some of those coalitions are still around helping people even more.

Take for example, The Healthy Communities Coalition, that I wrote about a few weeks ago, in the rurals of Northern Nevada. This amazing group of people with lots of different specialities and tools, was formed to assist folks with food access, health care, children’s services, housing information and eviction protection, foster care placement, services for families of incarcerated people, etc. and is now a foundational group supporting and holding people up so they can thrive. 

What does this administration mean for non-profits? For people wo work in communties? What are they afraid of? Are they making plans? Are they stressed and worried? Or ready to go?

Or are they wondering why they will have to struggle more, work harder and longer to save the very people who voted for and wanted this administation in power?

The first thing I thought when Trump 2.0 was elected, that in the effort to rid the government of trillions in waste, a lot of programs for the poor and vulnerable could be cut. I worried about life-saving, well-researched and thriving programs like TANF, WIC and EBT. I had no real basis to think Trump will slash these programs, since candidiates rarely even talk about the poorest and most vulnerable among us, so I did some research.

I went back to his first term. Some of these mandates came to fruition, the rest Trump tried to make happen and was blocked by congress (yay for checks and balances!). These stat are from Pro Publica, a journalistic source I trust 100%.

• Trump repeatedly tried to raise rents on at least 4 million of the poorest people in the country, many elderly and disabled. 

• He wanted to cut federal disability benefits for a quarter of a million low-income kids, if other people in the household also received a disability payment. 

• He wanted poor parents to pony up more child support with greater enforcement efforts behind it. One of those ways was by having poor moms disclose their sexual histories to the government in order to receive food assistance benefits. (Tracking women’s bodies as it pertains to sex seems to be a thing with these folks)

• He attempted to allow employers to be able to pocket worker’s tips. 

• He succeeded at denying pay to millions of low wage workers by not allowing pay on overtime if the worker made more than $35,568 annually. 

According to federal poverty researcher, Robert Greenstein: “Trump proposed significantly deeper cuts to programs for low-and modest-income people than any other president ever had, including Reagan, by far.” (And if you read The Meth Lunches you know Reagan’s policies did a ton of long-term damage to the stability of folks in the lower classes - we are still dealing with those implications decades later.)

Greenstein wrote a paper about this subject and in it, detailed exactly how Trump’s single term impacted the most vulnerable folks in our communities. And this is when he had checks and balances, people who had been in government before and understood the guardrails, what an administration can and cannot do and what the constitution can and cannot bear.

Here are some of his findings from the first Trump tterm: 

• SNAP: Trump proposed reductions of (roughly $200 billion over 10 years, or about 25 to 30 percent.) 

• Medicaid/ACA: Trump wanted to scale back the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), repeal the ACA altogether (Thank you John McCain for saving our insurance), and cut $750 billion to $1 trillion or more over 10 years out of the program. 

• Housing and Rental Assistance. Trump advocated for large reductions in rental assistance including rent increases over 40% for about 4 million low-income households that rent their units with rental vouchers or live in public housing. He wanted to eliminate the HOME program, the Community Development Block Grant, and the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP), all programs that help house low-income folks. 

• Cash Assistance. Trump advocated for large reductions in cash assistance, including 1) reductions in benefits for low-income children with disabilities through Supplemental Security Income (SSI) (when more than one child or both an adult and a child in the same family receive SSI) 2) a reduction of more than $20 billion over 10 years in federal Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) funding to states, and 3) a reduction in initial Social Security disability benefits for some beneficiaries. 

• Child Tax Credit: The 2017 tax cut that President Trump signed into law was modest. An estimated 10 million children—those in families with the lowest incomes, including families whose earner(s) works full-time at the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour—received either an increase of up to $75 or no increase. And only if they didn’t participate in other assistance programs, like SNAP. 

• Self-sufficiency: The Trump administration's message to low income families was to go out and get a job, support yourself, while proposing to scale back a number of programs to strengthen the ability of low-income individuals to secure and retain employment, like pulling back on job training programs and Job Corp by about 40 percent.

This is just the facts. No spin, no BS. No partisanship. This is shit that already happened. Documented by researchers and historians. We voted to invite these policies back into people’s lives. And this time without all the people checking him.

So why should we ask individuals and community non-profits to take on this extra work and urgency?

I remember when the city shut down our pantry after about a year. I remember being so angry. Relieved, in a lot of ways to be unburdened, free, but also angry that so much had fallen on a stupid beer fridge in my front yard.

There’s all this archaelogical evidence left behind of that time - the note I got from the server from Momofuku thanking me because she hadn’t had vegtables in weeks. The unhoused woman who came in to our house soaked to the bone and shivering, and my kids toweled her and her dog, Princess, off in our living room. That dog’s ashes are now buried in our front yard, so her owner can visit her whenever she wants. The way my son took care of a trans meth addict who was nearly burned alive in her tent by a vengeful John. He brought her plates of warm food and made a bed for her in one of our trucks, so she would be safe. I found the remanants of that folded up in the truck bed when we went to sell it.

When I think of those times and resurrect those memories, I also have to consider my anger then. It felt so clear to me - if the government wasn’t going to actively work to solve the problems of our most vulnerable people, then wasn’t my helping, my standing in the gap, just enabling them to not do their job? Shouldn’t I be tough-loving my country, refusing to pick up what they dropped?

What if all those community workers, who get no credit, no awards and often kicked in their own money to get shit done, just stopped? Or paused for a bit to catch their breath. To take stock. What if they just didn’t get involved anymore? What if they just said, this is on you. You wanted this. So, here you go.

You can burn it all down while I crochet these lovely socks. I’m good over here.

While writing this, I see Rachel Maddow, volume off, pummeling the screen with anger, and her smarts, and I know another me would’ve stopped and turned up the volume and got enraged with her. Later, I flicked past a news article about RFK Jr. possibly cutting 600 employees at the National Institutes of Health. (Four years after a global pandemic, mind you.) But it doesn’t hit me the way these jarring mandates have done in the past. I am not going down the tunnel of research to see how this might impact disease prevention, or small pox transmission.

Why? Because I already know from writing that when you chop a paragraph or a character out of an essay it impacts the whole story, its removal creates ripples and everything gets called into question, and then chaos reigns and the page is a disaster, the story isn’t working, and it’s nuts because you are finding all these little adjustments and changes you have to make because you chopped ONE LITTLE PART. Finally, you edit the mess and piece it all back together. But it’s a process. A dirty process. And it’s painful.

Gut this. Burn that down. Deport. Arrest. Abolish. Fire. Your body my choice out of the mouths of first graders. The ripples will be jarring, immense and will make us want to rage. But I’m not raging.

The Defused Bomb Theory

I will do what I usually do. I call this trick: Protective Dissociation or The Defused Bomb Theory. I used to think I was a nut for doing this, but my therapist tells me how great it is “my brain resourced for you during trauma.” I love therapy. They put positive spins on the worst stuff.

Take for instance, the middle school where they were clearly not helping my son, who was struggling with aggressive behaviors and learning disabilities. The school was not at all curious about why he was misbehaving and instead just wanted him docile and to supress his behaviors. There was a point in the meeting with the team that I realized they had no clue about his issues and would never be able to be responsive to needs or make any kind of adaptations. I smiled, nodded, acted all in (the disassociation part) knowing that anything I said was going to be dismissed and challenged - becaue they “were right.” I kept smiling through the whole meeting, said everything they wanted to hear, shook hands, exchanged pleasantries, and left knowing I was going to take matters into my own hands and leave these mother fuckers in the dust.

That’s my coping strategy. The Defused Bomb Theory is a smile, nod, agreement, a chill response, knowing full well you see their bullshit and you know, deep deep down, you are never going to comply, give in or let them win. A thin film of resistance forms a wall around you after that. Their criticisms and impotent plans never get to you. Oh you know they are there, you just don’t feel it. You are all observation and resistance, while maintaing a calm veneer to manage your own emotions and keep yourself regulated.

There is a turning point in The Defused Bomb Theory. When you know there is no point in fighting as you had before, that the decisions have been made, talk and arguing and fighting is over, and you just have to accept the situation, as is. But you have to protect yourself, too. In an imaginary way, you step back, the thin taught shield forms around you. You are still plugged in, aware, but the film protects you from everything penetrating. You feel it, but it can’t beat you down, can’t get to you.

I relish being a defused bomb for now. I may have to let go, shoot off the sparks, deton-fucking-ate. But I’m not going to be chaotic about it. I’m going to pick my battles.

I’m resting up for when I’m called.

________________

END NOTES:

I found some comfort in Robert Reich’s videos about how we have been here before and how we can get through it again. It is far from over. Take care of yourself.

I had an amazing time at Buffalo State this week where over 100 people showed up. We talked, exchanged ideas and I am in love with the faculty and students there in both the social work, and nutrition and dietetics programs. Thanks for having me!

Thank you, as always, for reading. xo Kim