Pseudo Manifesto

To all my libertarian friends (and anybody else that wants me to be ashamed of poverty)

First, by your own values I owe you nothing. However, I have to live with me so I consider politics and morality on the reg.

I am not ashamed of being poor. A lot of how I got here had to do with shame and fear, but let me lay it out plainly:

Your position does not give you exclusive license to morality, to a sense of worth.

I need help right now. My family needs help right now. I’ll stop accepting help just as soon as I don’t need it. In the meantime, I’ll figure out how I can help. Why wouldn’t I?

Well why don’t you just get a job?
1. I am not physically capable of performing any of the dead end jobs I could land.
2. I have a job. I work. All the time. It’s words and images I shape, but it is work nonetheless.
3. If I were to go to work at Walmart, what would it land me?
  a. A great deal of pain.
  b. Possibly slightly more money than I make as a starving artist.
  c. Spending 40+ hours a week in abject misery.

I’ve done all that already. (And when I was a libertarian I participated in NO entitlement programs, you asshole conservatives with EBT cards…)Fuck that. And importantly, I cannot do these jobs.

With government assistance, Sharaya and I can keep the kids and ourselves fed, clothed, and reasonably happy. With little help from family, we are currently sheltered. My words draw in enough money to more or less cover the rest… not that very much more is actually necessary.

Is it the misery that makes the work valid?

Without government assistance? … well that is a scary prospect.

But what about theft? GOVERNMENT HAS BEEN IS STEALIN’
The things you more successful folks have created, were not created in a vacuum. You had help whether you liked it or not.

Trying to decide how much of everything everyone deserves out of everything all the time seems like a crazy fucking way to live.

No wonder I was so fucking tired and angry as a Randian.

So instead, everybody pay in. There is a social safety net.

Without being totally concerned about whether or not our children starve, myself and many others are free to swing for the fences with new and exciting ideas. The people more concerned with certainty are still allowed to act like that. You are still free to generate gross amounts of wealth… just nobody has to die in the fucking streets.

Do you not see that without that safety net, our lives are significantly more dangerous and less free?

Do you really think that $8 /hr you got for flipping burgers in high school was solely created by you?

Do you believe that your inheritance is somehow earned exclusively by you, if you have such a luxury? By what? The accident of birth? Was smiling at great grandma actually, factually worth several million dollars?

Anyway, I’m not ashamed of where I am. I am trying to get better, be better.

I’m also willing to help you, if I can (and if you’d let me).

So anyway before leveling that most horrid accusation that I am nothing but a terrible blight on your bright futures, some fucking leech to your otherwise shining success…

Before you do that, please take a step back.

And go ahead and fuck your own face off.

Love and Void,
Evey -_-]