The Cost of Falling, The Hatred of Humanity, and the Ugliness of Cruelty
From personal collapse to political reckoning — what it's like to need help in a country hellbent on punishing humanity.
One year ago today, I was admitted to the ER of the Phoenix Indian Medical Center because I had lost the ability to sit, stand, or walk.
Back pain wasn’t new; A cheerleading accident in high school and ballooning past 300lbs in adulthood made it a fact of life. It was extra concerning this time around for two reasons; (1) It wasn’t going away this time, to the point that my hair was matted because I couldn’t stand in the shower long enough to wash it, and (2), I had lost 110 pounds, which (according to the half-dozen doctors I had talked to about my back in the previous 5 years) meant that my back pain should be dissipating, not increasing.
I got to try morphine for the first time…
About five minutes after taking this picture, the doctor brought in the results of my CT scan.
Slipped disk. Risk of nerve damage. Transfer to a bigger hospital with specialized doctors.
The morphine helped me stay cheery through my first ambulance ride, but as the night wore on and I realized I wasn’t going home, it started to sink in that a big, scary thing was happening.
A medical team assembled like the Avengers the next day; two of my discs were completely ruptured with one causing a 95% blockage of my spinal canal (meaning that every single movement, no matter how small, was plucking my nerves like a guitar string). Beyond the extreme, unrelenting pain, the surgeon said that the condition put me at risk for Cauda Equina syndrome, which would result in bowel and bladder dysfunction.
Ultimately, we decided on surgery.
Fate smiled down on me: We caught it in time and, health wise, my recovery has been miraculous. Unfortunately, the fallout wasn’t just physical.
When all this happened, I was already living through the worst year of my life. Some of it was bad luck, but lots of it was ME… calling it wrong, making bad calls... By the time I lost the ability to sit, stand, or walk, I was already in the middle of a financial crisis, and a crisis of self-worth… and I was unemployed at the time of the surgery, meaning I had no health insurance. I was already behind in rent with hundreds of job applications submitted to employers, but no prospects.
Never in my life have I felt more lost; both figuratively and literally, I had fallen down and could not get back up.
Meet Sushi & Christy: They Saved My Life
Sushi and I have been best friends & roommates for the better part of a decade. He and Christy dated years back and reconnected in March 2023; Eventually, she moved in too, and I was blessed with a second best friend.
Here’s the thing; I was NOT a good friend last year.
It’s one thing to help & support someone for a back surgery; that’s expected and common, though no less generous. But you have to understand, I had already become a burden before my back got bad. I couldn’t find a job, and they were floating all my expenses.
I’m an adult. They’re adults. We share no blood.
THEY. OWED. ME. NOTHING.
They carried my weight anyway.
Sushi & Christy put off buying a house last year because they covered my rent. They struggled with the bills because, out of nowhere, they found themselves with an extra mouth to feed. They held me up even when they had no expectation of repayment or reward. THEY paid, quite literally, a hefty price for MY personal issues… and they chose to love me still.
In every definable way, they are my heroes.
What if I Didn’t Have a Christy & Sushi?
I smell bankruptcy in my future…
Sushi & Christy have put in an offer for a home; I’m filled with gratitude that their dreams weren’t derailed entirely, but it’s still hard to look in the mirror knowing how much I still owe them… and how long it will take to make them whole again.
At the very least, I’m proud to report that my personal life has achieved some semblance of stability in 2025, albeit with a new poverty-chic vibe. My body is in good health, and I’m employed… Still, my life is forever changed by this period.
One’s worldview is permanently altered by the experience of helplessness; You realize, in an instant, that we are all SO MUCH MORE vulnerable than we care to admit. The vast majority of Americans need only miss one or two paychecks before spiraling down into a situation like mine, and most of them won’t have a Sushi & Christy. Their family might not be able to bear their weight when they fall.
Unfortunately, at the same time our country is gutting social safety nets, we’re criminalizing homelessness.
Executive Order
Yesterday, July 24, President Trump signed a new Executive Order titled “Ending Crime and Disorder on America’s Streets.” In stating their rationale for the policy: “Endemic vagrancy, disorderly behavior, sudden confrontations, and violent attacks have made our cities unsafe,” the EO reads. “The Federal Government and the States have spent tens of billions of dollars on failed programs that address homelessness but not its root causes, leaving other citizens vulnerable to public safety threats.”
If you’re not a fan of political speech, let me give you the TL;DR version:
Homeless People = Drug Addicts & Mentally Ill = Unsafe Cities
Then, they lay it out plainly:
“Shifting homeless individuals into long-term institutional settings for humane treatment through the appropriate use of civil commitment will restore public order. Surrendering our cities and citizens to disorder and fear is neither compassionate to the homeless nor other citizens. My Administration will take a new approach focused on protecting public safety.”
Long story short: The Trump Administration intends to reduce homelessness by involuntarily committing them. Stripping them of their freedom… for being homeless. For struggling. For needing help.
Other notable excerpts from the EO include:
Ending “harm reduction” and “safe consumption”
Ending “housing first” policies
Adding substance use treatment or mental health services as a condition for receiving housing or assistance
Axios reports that we’ve tried this before, and we stopped doing it because it frequently violated Fourteenth Amendment rights of due process. Donald Whitehead, executive director of the National Coalition for the Homeless, notes “These executive orders ignore decades of evidence-based housing and support services in practice… “[the orders] represent a punitive approach that has consistently failed to resolve homelessness and instead exacerbates the challenges faced by vulnerable individuals."
Ann Oliva, CEO of the National Alliance to End Homelessness, states her views more bluntly: “This order represents the most harmful policy proposal on homelessness in my career.”
The Audacity of This Move in This Economy
We should be clear about what life is like for the vast majority of Americans… here are just a few facts to consider:
The top 1% of Americans hold roughly the same amount of wealth as the bottom 50%.
The median home price in 2025 is more than $400,000.
The minimum wage has not been increased in 16 years.
In 2023, 52% of renters paid more than 30% of their income on rent, while half of those renters paid more than 50% of their income, according to Pew Research.
The United States Interagency Council on Homelessness notes: “As many as 40%-60% of people experiencing homelessness have a job, but housing is unaffordable because wages have not kept up with rising rents. There is no county or state where a full-time minimum-wage worker can afford a modest apartment.”
These were the realities as Donald Trump took office for the second time; since then, he’s taken a wrecking ball to many of the social safety programs that helped people get back on their feet… let alone enacting tariffs that are raising the price of everything.
And now this.
It’s cruel. It’s heartless. It’s inhumane.
It goes against everything this country is supposed to stand for.
MAGA’s War on the Working Class
As a working-class American, this feels like the type of policy that could only be written by a bigot or a billionaire; So thoroughly devoid of basic humanity, lacking even a shred of consideration for the economic reality of most Americans, that it seems comically villainous.
But then you remember; They're serious.
The Trump Administration appears determined to recommend mass imprisonment (and violating the Constitution) as the apparent solution to all our country’s problems. It was simply hypocritical back in the day to call ourselves The Land of the Free; now, it feels like a bold-faced lie.
There is so much that worries me about MAGA politics. It preys on the poor and uneducated at large, and white Americans in particular; people who were otherwise kind, productive, valued members of society… but powerful people had powerful tools and unlimited budgets to identify & stoke their bias, then manipulate them with it. MAGA is intentional distortion of reality, it bastardizes American history, erases American values, and it’s so blatantly, disgustingly, openly racist. But none of that is what worries me most.
America the Ugly
We’ve always had a hypocritical slant to our values, but we could admit it out loud; part of America’s story was the continued striving to embody the ideals we were founded on. Freedom and Liberty, where all people are created equal. An endless striving for better. Now, it feels like we’ve abandoned them entirely.
I can’t imagine what on Earth should make us proud of our country right now.
The thing is, being a giant dictatorial asshole doesn’t make you great. It never has, and it never will. Only monsters believe that. To the rest of the world, you just look hateful. Cruel. Impossibly selfish, and uncivilized.
What worries me most is how ugly the soul of America is becoming, with every passing day of this hateful regime.
I believe it was Gandhi who once said, “you can judge a society by how it treats its most vulnerable members,” or something to that effect…
If this is our plan for dealing with homelessness, then we have no right to be surprised when our country is judged harshly. We’ll have no one to blame but ourselves.
This doesn’t make us great. It makes us ugly.
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