I've been having a day. I've also been forced to realize that patriotism depends on circumstance in this country. I put together some writing and then argued with Claude.ai. The hope was to create a piece that flowed like that of the Frederick Douglass "What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?" I think we did a pretty good job, and the vernacular is still apparent.
I wouldn't mind if everyone in America read this today, so feel free to share (hint).
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What to a Poor Man Is the Fourth of July?
Fellow-citizens — for so I must still call you, though I confess the word sits strangely in my mouth on a day such as this — I attempt to train my thoughts on independence.
You have asked a poor man to praise a rich man's holiday. You have set before me a table groaning with fireworks and flags and cold lemonade, and you have asked me to lift my cup with the rest of you and toast the Fourth of July.
I will not do it.
Or rather — I will do it, but not as you expect. I will speak of the Fourth of July as it appears to a man who has stood, this very year, in a courtroom he could not afford to be summoned to, for a crime he could not afford to avoid committing. I will speak of it as it appears to a woman who sat three hours in the folding chair of a clinic waiting room, watched over by a corporation whose name changes every time it is bought by a larger corporation, and who left no wiser about her own body than when she arrived. I will speak of it, in short, as it appears to the poor.
To you, the comfortable, the Fourth of July is a pageant of liberty remembered. To us, it is a pageant of liberty rehearsed but never delivered — a play we are made to attend, though we are never given a part beyond that of the crowd that cheers.
You will tell me of the Founders, and of the tyranny of taxation without representation, and I will not dispute a word of it. But I ask you: what tyranny is it, then, when a man is compelled by law to carry insurance on an automobile, and compelled by a second law to register that same automobile, and finds — upon inquiry — that no company will sell him the first thing until he has already produced proof of the second, and no government office will grant him the second thing until he has already produced proof of the first? What do you call a wall with no door, built by the state and enforced by the state, against a man too poor to scale it? I do not know what you call it. I call it a trap with the teeth pointed inward, set for the very people least equipped to spring it and walk away whole.
This is not a parable. This is my life, delivered to me this spring in the form of handcuffs.
I was arrested and jailed — not for theft, not for violence, not for any harm done to another living soul — but for the crime of being unable to afford, simultaneously, a working automobile, a policy of insurance upon it, and a current registration to prove both. I ask you which of these three a poor man is meant to surrender first, when the wage does not stretch to cover all. I surrendered none by choice. The choice was made for me, by arithmetic, and then the state arrived to punish me for the sum.
Some are jailed for not paying taxes. I was jailed for not paying Jake from State Farm. The shame is that another powerful corporation told us that Mr. Goodwrench knows, “It’s not just your car; it’s your freedom.” Corporate America knows what they do, they choose to do it, and we must pay them as they do it.
Laugh if you must — I have laughed at it myself, in the particular bitter way a man laughs when the alternative is weeping — but consider what the laughter conceals. Consider that my freedom, the very liberty this day is meant to commemorate, was priced by an insurance adjuster before it was ever priced by a judge. Consider that when the judge did have his turn, she added to my ledger twelve hundred dollars in fines and costs, payable by a man whose whole trouble began in not having enough money — as though the cure for poverty were more of its cause. I did not have a car I could safely operate before my arrest. I have less than that now. This is not justice. This is compound interest charged against a man for the sin of being poor in a country that requires wealth as the price of mobility. I am taken to a quote from a video game, Final Fantasy, for the quickest version of the situation:
If the penalty for a crime is a fine, then that law only exists for the lower class.
And here is the deeper wound, fellow-citizens, the one beneath the wound: none of this was legislated by any body I elected. No congressman voted to make Jake from State Farm the gatekeeper of my liberty. No statute reads, "a poor man shall be jailed twice — once by the law, once by the ledger." And yet here I stand, twice jailed, and I never cast a vote for either sentence.
I have heard it said — and I did not coin the words myself, though I have earned the right to repeat them — that America used to be a nation of laws. This value set is no longer true. Today, America is a nation of corporate policies. These are what govern our daily lives, and we voted for none of it. We did not vote for the insurance company's underwriting rules that decide, more surely than any legislature, whether a poor man may lawfully drive to his job. We did not vote for the hospital chain's billing algorithm that decides, more surely than any physician, how a sick man shall be treated and how much his treatment shall cost him in the years he has left to pay it. These policies were not debated on any floor where the poor had a seat. They were written in boardrooms, and we ratified them the only way we are ever permitted to ratify anything — by submission.
Let me speak, then, of the clinic, since I have already spoken of the courtroom, for the two are cousins raised in the same house.
I am cared for now — if "cared for" is the phrase — by a health system so vast that no single person within it appears to know my name. I have sat before multiple physicians in three visits and repeated my history multiple times with each introduction. I am not a patient in that place. I am a claim number moving through a building, and the building's true patient, the only patient it is designed to heal, is its own quarterly statement. Physicians no longer focus on healing the sick as much as meeting myriad requirements as dictated by a computer screen they watch more closely than the human patient sitting behind them. To the impoverished patient, this is a glory hole; to the physician, this is a junk drawer.
This is what independence has become, for the poor, in the country that invented the word: independence from representation, but never independence from plate-reading, constant surveillance. Independence from the vote that might change the corporate policy, but never independence from the corporate policy itself. We are watched by insurers, billed by hospitals, ticketed by the state, and fined by the courts, and at every turn we are told that this is liberty, because no king sits on a throne to order it done. But I put it to you — does it matter to the man in the cell whether his jailer wears a crown or a name badge? Does it matter to the woman in the waiting room whether her fate is decided by a monarch or a middle manager, if in both cases her voice was never asked for and her circumstance was never considered?
I have sat, some evenings, before the television, and watched your glorious sporting events — the stadiums packed to their rafters, the cameras panning lovingly across seas of people who came, many of them, on a whim, on a Tuesday, because the mood struck them. And I have done the arithmetic I seem condemned to do about everything now, and found that a single ticket to a single seat at such a game costs more than the fine the state extracted from me for the crime of poverty. I do not begrudge any man his seat. I only note that some among you may throw money at an afternoon's amusement without a second thought, while I have not taken my family on a single vacation in two years, and have not laid eyes on my own grown children in that same span of time, because the fare to reach them and the roof over their heads while I visited were never, in that time, both within my reach at once. This too is a kind of liberty denied — not the liberty to speak, or worship, or vote, which no one has taken from me on paper, but the liberty to simply go, to arrive, to sit at a table with the children I raised. That liberty, apparently, is sold, and I have not had the price of it in two years.
You will forgive me, then, if I do not join the toast today with an open heart. I will watch your fireworks. I have, after all, no legal authority to drive away from them. I will listen to your speeches about the liberty our fathers bled for, and I will think of the twelve hundred dollars I owe for the crime of being unable, all at once, to pay for a car, its insurance, and its registration, in a system built so that no poor man can ever manage all three. I will think of the clinic that does not know my name. And I will ask, as I believe I have earned the right to ask, on this day above all others:
What, to the poor man, is your Fourth of July?
Let me answer from the perspective of a man standing in a room set to 82 degrees Farenheit, in a house that costs over $20 per day in electricity costs. It is, I answer–a day that reveals more starkly than any other–the distance between the liberty you celebrate and the liberty we are permitted to touch. It is your celebration, not ours — a national jubilee to which we send our labor, our taxes, our fines, and our silence, and from which we receive, in return, the spectacle of lights in a sky we watch from a doorstep, having nowhere lawful and affordable to drive.
