The One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) will not take my food stamps. I don’t have any. I’ve never applied for them. I buy my groceries with my own income, and I’m fortunate enough not to worry whether I’ll have dinner tonight. But for millions of Americans—mothers, veterans, seniors, and disabled citizens—those benefits are the difference between nourishment and hunger. Under OBBBA, that fragile thread may be cut. And even if I don’t starve, I still grieve for those who will.
That is what compassion looks like. That is what citizenship should mean.
I won’t lose my Medicaid coverage—because I don’t use Medicaid. I pay high monthly premiums for private health insurance, which helps cover the absurd costs of American medicine. But 14 million people, many of them children and working-class parents, will lose their healthcare under OBBBA. Some will die. J.D. Vance, when told this, said simply, “It is immaterial.”
Let that sink in. Their lives. Immaterial.
I am not on Section 8. I don’t live in public housing. But I know what it’s like to worry about rent, and I know what eviction does to families. Housing assistance is a vital safety net for those hanging by a thread. OBBBA begins the quiet unraveling of that net. The people it traps will not be criminals, freeloaders, or enemies of the state. They will be Americans. Your neighbors. Your veterans. Your elderly. Your fellow human beings.
And they will be discarded.
I don’t rely on free school lunches. But millions of children do. Under OBBBA’s grotesque new math, those lunches are now “nonessential.” Hunger is back on the menu.
I don’t have DACA protections. I was born here. I carry the correct papers and speak with the right accent. But I have met Dreamers who love this country more fiercely than many who were born into it. They go to school, they pay taxes, they start businesses. And now, under OBBBA’s shadow, they are hunted, processed, and exiled—sacrificed to feed the beast of white grievance.
I could go on. SNAP. SSI. Legal aid. Tenant protections. Environmental safeguards. All are bleeding from a thousand paper cuts hidden deep in OBBBA’s baroque cruelty. All are being shredded in the name of “efficiency,” “order,” or “border control”—which in this America have become euphemisms for pain.
But the most important thing I want you to understand is this:
It doesn’t have to affect me to matter.
This is the disease MAGA has spread—this rot of selective empathy, where if it isn’t your job, your kids, your lungs, your skin, then it isn’t real. They call it strength. They call it America First. But it’s cowardice in camouflage. It is selfishness masquerading as patriotism. And it is eroding everything decent about this country.
Trump, the bill’s spiritual author, lives by one rule: If he’s okay, the rest can burn.
He is a man incapable of empathy. We see that in every grin, every insult, every veto pen stroke. He laughs while others weep—and then calls it winning.
I want no part of that America.
Not the America that cages children and calls it security.
Not the America that treats poverty as a personal failure and cruelty as a political virtue.
Not the America that wraps itself in a flag while tearing out its own moral spine.
I will not celebrate a country where my comfort is bought with your suffering. I will not call it “order” when families are torn apart. I will not call it “strength” when the poor are blamed for their poverty and the sick punished for being sick.
But don’t mistake me. I am patriotic. Fiercely so.
My allegiance is not to the petty dystopia that Trump is gilding with gold paint and barbed wire. It’s to the promise at the core of our founding: liberty, justice, and dignity for all.
That dream is not dead. But it is under siege.
And I will not sit quietly while it is replaced by a grinning, boot-stomping counterfeit—cheered on by a cult that mistakes domination for greatness.
So no, OBBBA doesn’t take from me. Not directly. But it steals from my nation. It robs my neighbors. It hurts children. And for that, I will stand against it with everything I have.
Even if I never need food stamps. Even if I never lose my home. I still know injustice when I see it. And I still give a damn. Because unlike those who cheer cruelty from a distance, I still believe that we rise together—or not at all.