Sometimes, you get to pick your battles. On items that don’t directly affect me, I can choose whether or not to have an opinion, and whether or not to do the research to be informed. Sure, being a good, well-informed person with a consistent ethical framework dictates that I try to have empathy even for issues that don’t impact me, and that I ought apply my principles in a consistent way, such that I tend to have opinions anyway. But I get to decide, for instance, to what degree I care about same sex marriage, or what’s happening in Yemen, or the regulations governing labor unions. None of these things has a noticeable effect on my day to day life, and as such I have the privilege of being able to ignore them without consequence.
Of course, this isn’t always the case. There are lots of policies that do directly affect me. The price of tuition, for instance, is of great concern, since I am presently engaged in acquiring a degree which I hope will allow me to get a job that will let me pay my bills, ideally without having to take out a small fortune in loans to cover it. Transport policy affects because I am an adult with places to be who cannot drive, and current American transport policy borders on actively hostile to people in my position.
And then there’s healthcare. I’m not a single issue voter, far from it, but healthcare is a make or break issue for me, since it dictates whether I, and many people I care about dearly, live or die. The policies of the US government in this area determine access to the tools of my life support, whether my insurance company is allowed to discriminate against me, and what price I have to pay to stay alive. These policies are life and death, but that turn of phrase is overused, so let me put it another way:
With the policy as it is now, I can scrape by. Others can’t, which is tragic, but I’m lucky enough to have money to burn. If the policy changes to make my medication affordable the same way it is in Mexico, I will in one stroke save enough money each year to cover my tuition forever. If policy changes to remove existing protections, then nothing else in the world will matter, because I will go bankrupt and die in short order. It won’t even be a question of choosing between medication and food or rent; without my medication I don’t live long enough to starve to death, and the money I’d save by starving is trivial anyway. I don’t have the privilege of choosing whether to care, or even which side I fall on. I would love to have other priorities; to say that Climate Change is the greatest threat, or immigration is a moral imperative, or whatever other hill I might elect to die on. But for the time being, as long as I want to continue breathing, I have my political opinions chosen for me.
That’s the way it’s been for as long as I have had political opinions of which to speak. But recently, there’s been a shift. Suddenly, after years of having to beg minor officials to listen, with the presidential election gearing up, people have begun to take notice. Talking points which I and the people I work with have been honing and repeating for seemingly eons are being repeated by primary front runners. With no apparent proximal trigger, our efforts have gained attention, and though we remain far from a solution that will stand the test of repeated partisan attempts to dismantle it, a potential endgame is in sight.
But this itself brings new challenges. Where before we could be looked upon as a charity case worthy of pity, now we have become partisan. Our core aims- to make survival affordable in this country -have not changed, but now that one side has aligned themselves publicly with us, the other feels obliged to attack us. Items which I previously had to explain only to friends, I now find myself having to defend to a hostile audience. Where once the most I had to overcome was idle misinformation, now there is partisan hatred.
This is going to be a long campaign. I do not expect I shall enjoy it, regardless of how it turns out. But my work to etch out a means of survival continues.
