I watch my government starve an island of 11 million people over a 60-year grudge and call it foreign policy. I watch my tax dollars bankroll bombs that level hospitals, erase entire families, and bury children beneath concrete, and I’m told that’s “supporting an ally.” I watch billions poured into server farms and data centers so machines can generate birthday cards, advertisements, and corporate emails while actual human beings are rationing insulin, skipping meals, and sleeping in cars because surviving became too expensive. I watch families ripped apart and locked behind fences with a badge and an American flag stamped on the door, and somehow cruelty becomes respectable the moment somebody gives it an official government acronym. I watch the drums of another war get louder, aimed at another country filled with ordinary people who never asked for any of this. And I already know whose sons and daughters will be sent to bleed for it. Not theirs. Never theirs. The politicians pounding their chests won’t be sleeping in a desert tent. The billionaires cheering from television studios won’t be carrying rifles. Their children won’t be getting folded flags handed to them at funerals. Working-class families will pay that bill, too. Meanwhile, people can’t go to the doctor without doing math first. I’m still paying off a degree I earned a decade ago like it’s a mortgage with no damn house attached. I know people working two jobs who still can’t afford a one-bedroom apartment. People with full-time jobs are visiting food banks. Teachers are buying supplies for their own classrooms. Parents are checking bank balances before taking a sick child to urgent care. We are constantly told there isn’t enough money when ordinary Americans need something. Healthcare? Too expensive. Housing? Too complicated. Education? Who’s going to pay for it? Feed hungry children? Suddenly everyone becomes a fiscal conservative. But somehow the checkbook flies open when somebody wants another bomb, another detention center, another surveillance system, another corporate subsidy, another war, or another billion-dollar technological monument to people who already have more money than they could spend in ten lifetimes. Funny how the national credit card only seems to get declined when the purchase is human dignity. So no, I don’t want my money spent on cruelty dressed up as policy. I don’t want it spent on war, cages, starvation, servers, or genocide with a press release written afterward to make everyone feel civilized about it. I want it spent keeping people alive. Keeping people housed. Keeping people educated. Making healthcare something you receive when you’re sick instead of something you calculate whether you can afford. Making sure a person working 40 hours a week can actually afford to live in the country they’re working in. Making sure veterans aren’t sleeping underneath bridges after this country finished using their bodies. Making sure children eat lunch whether their parents are rich, poor, documented, undocumented, Republican, Democrat, or none of the damn above. That’s not radical. That’s not asking for too much. That is the bare minimum of what a government that collects our taxes, sends our children to war, writes our laws, and demands our allegiance should owe the human beings living underneath its flag. We have somehow built a system capable of finding unlimited money for destruction and then demanding a PowerPoint presentation when somebody suggests helping people survive. And I’m supposed to believe my priorities are unreasonable? No. If wanting my tax dollars to improve human lives instead of destroying them makes me the problem, then fine. I’ll be the problem. I’ll be loud about it, too. Because somebody in power desperately needs reminding that those buildings belong to us, those salaries come from us, that money comes from us, and that authority exists because we gave it to them. They work for us. Maybe it’s time they started acting like it.