We are all exhausted right now, but we show up with as much as we can every day. One hundred percent looks different to the same person each day, and we just do our best and try again tomorrow. Times in this political climate (which some of us predicted if we got there) are hard and anxiety-inducing. The working class, we’re all collectively trying to save ourselves while trying to save on another because most of us know that we have more in common with the unhoused person begging for spare change than the billionaire that started his/her company with a “small loan of a million dollars” from their family.

We all wake up, get out of our beds, no matter the size, and we let out a huge breath of air, not knowing what the federal government will try to pull to continue the decimation of the working people. We’re working on ourselves, working on each other, all while trying to come up for air. We’re fighting the cement brick tied to our feet under the guise of freedom in the lake of the American Dream.

Right now, with the uncertainty of food, housing rights, and healthcare, dreams feel like a luxury. But we cannot afford to stop dreaming because the opposite of a dream is hopeless, and we, no matter how financially poor we are, cannot lose hope. Instead, these are the times we should hope more. Hoping for so much because so many things are happening at once is exhausting, but we’ll do it because the next generation and the one after deserve it. We should not idolize the people we pay (via our taxes) to represent us. We should make every single person in office nervous because the working class doesn’t/shouldn’t just give out our votes when they should earn it.

Fun Fact: Nancy Pelosi has been in office longer than I’ve been alive.

We are at a pivotal time in history where future people will look back and question where our empathy was. “They could’ve saved the drinking water, housing the unhoused, instead they chased money.” But what happens when no one has enough and every natural resource stops running, and we can’t see the sun because no one wanted to protect it? All they saw was green. Green just becomes a color if you give it no value, no meaning. Isn’t that funny?

“Capitalism broke the moment the middle class evaporated. We’re blaming people using plastic straws for the decline of our ecosystem when we should be blaming the people making them.”