ORPHANS

I posted this to my Instagram Stories, but wanted to give it a less temporary home as well. I’ve been trying to get my PhD on this topic for over a year now, but funding. This is probably my greatest heartache and grief, what keeps me up at night, the alignment of capitalism and christianity in the conservative evangelical.

I don’t think we could get to Trump without the constant disenfranchisement of the working class, without telling people religion and capitalism are intertwined and normal, and leading the public to believe wealth will eventually trickle down if you work hard, while every succeeding generation gets poorer, more precarious, out-priced, and overladen with student and medical debt. Blaming refugees for fleeing war we had a hand in creating, blaming people of colour for poverty and crime when they were enslaved and then systemically and legally prevented from amassing wealth or property, blaming the sick while pharmaceutical companies legally made billions selling highly addictive opioids, blaming the unhoused for suffering from illnesses caused by trauma, war, poverty. Meanwhile the earth is falling apart in response to our abuse of its resources for capital gain and the 1% like the Duponts are poisoning entire towns and Bezos is orbiting space. This disparity between what is promised and the reality of our situation is getting stretched thin and people are angry. The angrier people are, the easier it is for more and more dangerous populist, authoritarian leaders to get elected because they seem to finally have the answer. Only by educating ourselves on our own history, political and economic, will we be equipped to understand what is unfolding before our very eyes.