Hi. It’s me. The Statistic living in Texas.
As I sit here still trying to avoid everything I am feeling, waiting for the hammer to drop where power goes out again and I once again huddle in candle light and wonder when I might get to see the lights on again, I am reminded of the old quote…
“The death of one is a tragedy, the death of a million is just a statistic”
I’m LGBT, I’m an immigrant, I knew what it was to be tokenized, but until this storm I didn’t know what it felt like to be just a statistic. To be a pawn, or a talking point.
I went three days without power, heard my friend and neighbor who was recovering from covid had died, helped my neighbors when I could. I saw parent’s who couldn’t cook for their freezing kids, and couldn’t get food delivered. I saw old folks trying to struggle to bring in snow to boil and tried to help them when I saw it (our water has been off and remains off since Sunday). We had to pull our food out of the fridge so it didn’t rot, putting it on the counter, and put our water in the fridge so it didn’t freeze.
All this was horrible, but I had felt a sense of community. Then I used my solar battery to charge my phone. I watched first hand as liberals ( I am a progressive lefty) mocked my state for voting red. Something like 48 percent of us voted blue, but as my friend Kirsty said, you shouldn’t have to be told not to mock people in a disaster no matter how they voted. I saw people just casually joking that we deserved it. I saw “sympathetic” people using our plight as talking points to smugly get their twitter cred. I saw Stephen King, a man I am a fan of, use my and my neighbors suffering as a zinger.
I know what it is now to be a statistic to people, to be a talking point. We were dying and the people who were supposedly on my political side, supposedly the “righteous” side mocked us. The irony being we run large windmill farms. Texas has been slowly turning progressive. Not just liberal, progressive.
I am a cancer survivor, but I think I mark this past week as the hardest in my life. Made harder by the realization that the people who supposedly fight for me only do so to validate themselves. If you really believe that gerrymandering is the reason more states aren’t blue and that your ideas are right and you just need the people on the right to see it… how can you act that way to people?
How can you use the suffering of others to boost yourself?
You say you fight for the PoC, the poor, and the LGBT? Which neighborhoods were the last one to see their lights again?
I live at the top of a hill in working class neighborhood, down the hill from me are are the upper class neighborhoods. As I saw their lights never flicker that answer was never more clear to me.
We’re not talking points in your political games you use to amuse yourself. We’re not here for to validate you. We’re people, and if you laughed at us while demanding we vote blue, how dare you?
You use our plight for political gain and if you lose an election you point a finger at us and say we deserved it, not caring who voted for who so long as you can feel morally superior. I am so sick of the politics in this country that boils people down to groups they can champion for social credit.
I am going in circle’s here but I am going to finish by saying this. I am a progressive, I will always vote progressive. One of the tenants in my apartment complex showed up with a big truck stacked high with wood he’d collected while it was snowing an inch an hour. He handed it out for free ‘til it was all gone. He wore a red cap that said “Make America Great Again” as he handed out lumber to help out his neighbors…
He never once asked us who we voted for.
(photo credit Dallas Morning News: