Number of kids returning to school this year: 48.1 million, all receiving free meals.

Number of people housed with the help of federal rental assistance: 10.4 million, 23 percent of whom are disabled.

Number of workers who lost their unemployment benefits on Labor Day: more than 8 million.

To help people, we have to know how many people are in need, how many people receive benefits, and what the gap is between those two numbers. For the past 15 years, the American Community Survey (ACS), conducted annually by the Census Bureau, has been one source of such data. But the pandemic made that data collection impossible.

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The American Community Survey tracks how Americans are doing on a granular level annually, not just once a decade: It measures the highest level of education people have completed, how many people experience poverty each year, and how people commute to work. Any community with at least 65,000 people has ACS data that anyone can view. That data is used to allocate resources for more than 130 programs, many of which fight poverty, including SNAP, Head Start, Section 8 vouchers, Unemployment Insurance, and the Census itself.

The Census Bureau collects the majority of its information through Internet, telephone, and mail-in surveys, then follows up with some of the people who do not respond with phone calls and in-person visits. But in 2020, the stay at home orders at the beginning of the pandemic interrupted the data collection process. Mail operations were canceled for April, May, and June of 2020, as were in-person interviews. So, while the Census did still get some respondents, it was not able to collect sufficient data among key groups who tend to be less responsive: People with lower incomes, lower educational attainment, and those who do not own their own homes. As a result, they decided they couldn’t offer their usual ACS data release.

The people we are missing data on are the exact group of people TalkPoverty focuses on: The same people who were hit hardest by the pandemic, and for whom accurate data is most important in developing a response.  The American Community Survey is how we know, for example, the number of people who have health insurance, what their household income is (and how much of it depends on public benefits), and how many people have dipped below the poverty line by state and congressional district. That’s especially important because it lets us track geographic inequities over time.

The Census will still be able to provide useful data from a related Census product, the Current Population Survey. That data, released September 14^th, will include national poverty rates, health insurance coverage data, and income data that lets us calculate the gender wage gap. We’ll have a broad sense of how Americans were faring overall in 2020, and how effective federal aid programs such as expanded Unemployment Insurance and SNAP were over the year. However, there will not be any state or local breakdowns of that data. So, while we will have the official annual poverty estimates, we will not have detailed data that would show if certain groups of people, such as Black women in Michigan or Latinas in Texas, were more likely to experience poverty in 2020.

Later this fall, the Census is releasing what it’s calling “experimental” ACS data on “a limited number of data tables for limited geographies.” It’s unclear right now what exactly that means – we do not know which data points or locations it will cover. It is unclear how the many agencies that rely on this data to calculate necessary funding for benefits will be doing their math, even as we need data more than ever to reflect changed economic circumstances for millions of Americans. What data there is will provide us with important information about a year when so many communities that rely on the safety net were in turmoil — from grocery store clerks to elementary school kids.

Superstore

The first season of Superstore is essentially The Office, set in a big box store where the workers are making minimum wage. There’s a will-they-won’t-they relationship between coworkers, a brutal assistant manager who would break Dwight Schrute’s spirit in under half an hour, and some classic slapstick to tie it all together.

But the longer the show is on, the better it gets. Beginning in season two, the show starts to tease out the substantive issues that define the characters’ lives and brings them to the forefront without ever getting heavy-handed. That’s not an easy feat: There are plot arcs that deal directly, and unflinchingly, with union busting, health care inequity, documentation status, and paid maternity leave.

The show isn’t perfect: We’d be remiss if we recommended it without noting that a disabled character is played by an actor who does not share his character’s disability. It’s a misstep that could have easily been avoided, and a blemish on a show that handles a number of complicated topics so deftly.

How to watch it: Superstore airs on NBC, and older episodes are available on Hulu. Start with episode two, season two, “Strike.”

Bob’s Burgers

Bob’s Burgers is one of the funniest, most consistent shows on TV. It’s heavy on jokes and wild premises, and its characters are a collection of beautifully unhinged, frantic, awkward humans who are inexplicably relatable. And, at its core, the show is about a working-class family that is barely scraping by. The titular restaurant is always in peril, wealthy business owners are an existential threat, and minor mishaps – like a broken minivan or a decrepit sofa – are big enough financial burdens that zany attempts to replace them often form the basis of an entire episode.

Most importantly, Bob’s Burgers is a joy to watch. It’s a rare depiction of a family that faces stress without becoming bitter, and that struggles without being victims.

How to watch it: New episodes are on FOX, and the entire series is on Hulu. If you’re going to binge it, start with season three – that’s when the show finds its footing.

The Fosters

The Fosters finished airing in June and it is genuinely heartwarming, for those looking for some basic queer joy. The Freeform family drama revolves around a lesbian couple raising five kids under one roof – four of whom are foster children. It delves into the working-class life of a police officer and vice principal navigating childrearing, living in a racially mixed family, and the challenges of the foster system. It’s rare to see queer families on television, especially lesbian families, even though nearly 16 percent of same-gender couples are raising children together. For those dismayed its run is over, a spinoff, Good Trouble, is coming to Freeform!

How to watch it: The whole show is on Netflix, and if you want to dip your toes in, try season one’s “I Do” (episode 10) for an extremely wholesome lesbian wedding, and “Quinceañera” (episode four) for some moving family drama.

On My Block

Four inner-city LA teens navigate their coming of age in On My Block, which is a frank look at a part of Los Angeles that’s usually glossed over or turned into a cautionary tale. Monse (Sierra Capri), Cesar (Diego Tinoco), Ruben (Jason Genao), and Jamal (Brett Gray) inhabit different aspects of the Latinx and Afro-Latinx experience in a vibrant narrative deeply rooted in lived experience.

It would be a mistake to focus on the exploration of gang violence here: On My Block also confronts deportations, teen sexuality, family, and more in a diverse reflection of contemporary teen life. Plus, you are going to love Ruben’s abuela.

How to watch it: It’s a Netflix Original, and with only one season available, you can start right at the beginning!

Speechless

Energetic mom Maya DiMeo (Minnie Driver) and her chaotic family enliven a drama that’s been widely praised by the disability community for its authentic handling of cerebral palsy from both the perspective of disabled youth growing into their autonomy and parents who advocate tirelessly for access and inclusion. Her son JJ is played by Micah Fowler, who actually has cerebral palsy and fills his role as the titular nonverbal character with gusto. Class comes in as the family struggles to find a good school for JJ, and ultimately finds itself living in the junkiest house in a fancy neighborhood and navigating all that comes with it.

How to watch it: Speechless airs on ABC and you can find the entire series on Hulu. You’ll want to start from the beginning to root yourself in the DiMeo family’s woes … and triumphs.

GLOW

Jenji Kohan’s newest show, based on the Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling series that ran from 1986-1992, is a classic dramedy about a band of misfits that defies the odds. The ensemble cast, featuring Marc Maron, Alison Brie, and Betty Gilpin, is comprised of deeply broken human beings who are trying to relaunch their careers (and redeem themselves after some truly astounding personal mistakes) by filming a low-budget women’s wrestling series in a run-down gym.

The episodes are a little uneven in quality, but the series engages directly with class in a way that feels original: Through the characters and the wrestling personas they take on. It’s worth watching just for real-life WWE star Kia Stevens, who plays Tammé. Tammé’s struggle with the wrestling persona she’s been assigned – who is literally named “Welfare Queen” – is given the air time it deserves in the second season. Her attempt to navigate the space between social responsibility and her very real need to support herself is messy and compelling.

How to watch it: GLOW is a Netflix Original. Start from the beginning, or you’ll struggle to piece together the dynamics between the characters.

The undisputed good news is that Americans chipped away at the old guard last night. After two years of constant stress about losing our health care, massive tax handouts to the wealthy, and open animosity towards anyone perceived as different, we finally gained some ground.

To celebrate, we’re taking a break from our usual doom and gloom and rounding up the results that we were excited to wake up to this morning.

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We finally have some good news about health care.

Congressional Democrats are in a better position to defend the Affordable Care Act, and are likely to work on stabilizing the ACA and addressing high drug prices in the new congress.

On a state level, voters were clearly motivated by concerns about health care. They also approved Medicaid expansion in three states: Idaho, Nebraska, and Utah. This extends Medicaid coverage to 340,000 low-income people.

The victories for Medicaid don’t stop there. In Maine, where the governor and voters have been engaged in a protracted battle over Medicaid expansion, Governor-elect Janet Mills says she’ll implement Medicaid expansion “immediately” upon taking office. Tony Evers in Wisconsin and Laura Kelly in Kansas could also drive expansion in their states, where leadership has historically resisted it. Sadly, all isn’t rosy: Montana voters rejected a ballot measure that would have extended Medicaid funding via a tobacco tax, ending coverage for nearly 100,000 residents.

A number of pro-choice candidates performed well last night. But two states, West Virginia and Alabama, amended their constitutions to specifically rule out the right to abortion. It’s a symbolic amendment for as long as Roe v. Wade stands, but the new balance on the Supreme Court could place it in jeopardy.

Florida is giving the vote to 1.4 million residents.

Florida’s Amendment 4 restored voting rights to people with felony records. Until last night, it had been one of only three states (now two) that denied people convicted of felonies the right to vote after they served their sentences. That disenfranchised more than 9 percent of the state’s population overall, and 21 percent of African Americans.

It’s difficult to estimate how big of an impact this could have moving forward, but it’s certainly possible that this influx of new voters will sway future elections. And, most importantly, it will allow more than a million people to vote on the policies that affect their lives.

One other bright spot last night was in Colorado: The state passed an amendment barring the use of slavery as punishment for a crime. Other ballot measures were, to put it nicely, kind of a bummer. Six states passed a version of Marsy’s law, which establishes a victims’ bill of rights that has the potential to violate the rights of people accused of crimes and makes it harder for people who are incarcerated to access parole boards and early release. In addition, North Dakota and Ohio both rejected measures that would lessen sentences for drug crimes.

Conservative states are raising their minimum wage.

Voters in Missouri and Arkansas approved increases in the minimum wage, which will together provide a raise to nearly 1 million workers. Missouri’s ballot initiative, which won with more than 62 percent of the vote, will hike its wage to $12 per hour by 2023. Arkansas’, approved by nearly 70 percent of voters, will increase the minimum wage to $11 per hour by 2021. Missouri’s initiative also reverses a minimum wage decrease that the state legislature imposed on St. Louis, which had raised its own minimum wage to $10 in 2017.

This continues a trend of minimum wage action on the state and local level. Though the federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour has not been increased since 2007, four states approved wage hikes in 2014, and four more did the same in 2016, while cities including Baltimore, Seattle, and Washington, D.C. have increased their own minimums.

Still, 21 states adhere to the federal minimum wage, the purchasing power of which peaked in the 1960s. We would certainly like to see more movement here, since wages have been stagnant across the country for the last several decades – particularly for low-income workers and black and Hispanic families.

Massachusetts will uphold rights for transgender Americans.

In 2016, Massachusetts passed a bill to prohibit discrimination based on gender identity in public places, but the law’s opponents managed to get it placed on the ballot this year. Voters upheld the law, which provides protections that don’t exist on a national level, by nearly 70 percent. In most states, it is still legal to discriminate against someone in housing, business, employment, and public accommodations because of their sexual orientation or gender identity.

Because we’re celebrating, we’ll gloss over how irritated the entire TalkPoverty staff is that it’s possible to put these rights on the ballot. Instead, we’ll look at this as a blow to the specious arguments that opponents to trans rights have been making against trans Americans.

San Francisco is taxing corporations to help people experiencing homelessness.

It was generally a bad night for tax policy on the state and local level, due to several states, including North Carolina, Florida, and Arizona, approving anti-tax ballot measures, and the defeat of an effort to raise corporate taxes and implement a progressive income tax in Colorado in order to spend more money on public schools.

However, San Francisco approved an increase in its corporate tax — which will be levied on about 300 of its biggest businesses — in order to raise money to combat the city’s homelessness epidemic. At least 50 percent of the funding will be dedicated to direct housing in a city where some 7,500 people are experiencing homelessness.

The successful campaign in San Francisco was mirrored in two other Bay Area cities and counters a similar effort in Seattle, where the city council passed and then repealed a “head tax” due to opposition from Amazon and other big corporations.

Then the Trump administration happened. For the past two years, reading the news has felt like inviting the worst parts of humanity to practice punching me in the solar plexus. What’s worse, on days that felt comparatively slow — when we weren’t on the brink of war or gutting our health care or bulldozing our immigration law — I got anxious. I was starting to depend on the Trump administration to provide me with something to which I could react.

That mode of thinking is exhausting. Even worse, it’s limiting. Instead of focusing on what society has the potential to be, I was focused only on the depths to which I hoped we wouldn’t sink.

It turns out that books can be a helpful remedy to this problem. They provide room for writers to explore, to indulge nuance, to push on boundaries, and provide readers the time to reflect on what’s been written. And, unlike Twitter, they don’t shine a bright electronic light in my eyes when I’m trying to go to bed.

This the first in a regular series rounding up books the TalkPoverty staff loves. We’re kicking it off with new releases that are all relevant to today’s most pressing issues, but excel in delving into the shades of gray that are often missing from breaking news coverage and Twitter threads.

Fiction

The Golden State by Lydia Kiesling

In some ways, The Golden State is a classic road novel: It follows its main character, Daphne, as she flees San Francisco and sets out for the high desert of California. She’s looking, like so many travelers before her, for freedom, adventure, and a break from bureaucracy. The catch is that unencumbered freedom isn’t a real option: Every point in Daphne’s journey is marked by her caretaking of her 16-month-old daughter, Honey.

Daphne’s relationship with her daughter, and with motherhood, has a fullness and honesty I’ve only seen once before (in Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts). She loves her daughter desperately, but her exhaustion and frustration with Honey’s needs and tantrums slowly build into something like dread and rage. The result is a novel that’s both beautiful and challenging, probing ideas around domesticity and freedom of movement that, in worse books, are treated as if they are opposites.

For you if: You’re interested in experimental stream-of-consciousness works, or themes around immigration, parenting, and domesticity.

The Caregiver by Samuel Park

Park’s last novel, completed shortly before his death, is another, completely different, mother-daughter tale. It alternates between 1980s Brazil and 1990s Los Angeles while the main character, Mara, cares for a woman dying of stomach cancer who dredges up memories of Mara’s complicated relationship with her mother. It’s a story about the way Mara survived in both countries — as an undocumented caretaker in the United States and as a poor child in Brazil — that’s engaging, if slightly soapy.

The book alternates between being thrilling and introspective, vacillations that are almost certainly due to Park imbuing the women for whom Mara was caring with the same illness that was killing him.

For you if: You want to a novel with compelling characters that’s heavy on plot, or themes around being undocumented or providing health care.

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Non-fiction

Give People Money: How a Universal Basic Income Would End Poverty, Revolutionize Work, and Remake the World by Annie Lowrey

Universal Basic Incomes are officially mainstream, but advocates of the policy — from Silicon Valley tech bros to libertarians to Black Lives Matter activists — are strange bedfellows with very different explanations for why we should give everyone a monthly cash sum.

Lowrey’s book walks through each group’s justification for backing the policy. She’s thorough and respectful of subjects throughout, but clear about whose arguments she is — and isn’t — buying.

For you if: You want an accessible long read on a newly-trendy economic policy.

What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia by Elizabeth Catte

This pocket-sized rebuttal to the oft-cited Hillbilly Elegy re-situates Appalachia as part of the United States, instead of the far-thrown Trump Country that has been the subject of media fascination.

Catte, a historian from East Tennessee, walks readers through the region’s history with industry and race, and current residents’ organizing efforts around land and labor. While the book doesn’t transform the region into a liberal paragon, Catte does portray it with the kind of nuance you would expect from a real place: one with serious problems, a complicated history, and a lot of very different people trying to figure out what to do next.

For you if: You’re still talking about Linda Tirado’s drunk reading of Hillbilly Elegy.

Memoir

Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth by Sarah Smarsh

Sarah Smarsh has been treated as a sort of spokeswoman for the working class since her viral essay, “Poor Teeth,”  captured her family’s experience with a blend of honesty, compassion, and humor that only comes with real experience. Her memoir, Heartland, is written from the very same place as the essay that made her famous: One that has the audacity to love and respect a poor family.

The book tells stories that are equal parts joyful and horrifying, and situates her family’s life in the policies that made it impossible for them to afford health insurance or compete with agribusiness. It’s not quite perfect — the framing device featuring a non-existent daughter doesn’t quite land for me — but it’s an extremely powerful and pointed meditation on class in America.

For you if: You’re a sucker for a beautiful memoir.

Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower by Brittney Cooper

Before Rebecca Traister published her much-anticipated Good and Mad, Brittney Cooper had written an entire treatise on the power in black women’s anger, and the contempt the country has for it.

Eloquent Rage focuses on the web of sexism, racism, and class, grounding Cooper’s understanding of all three in her own coming of age. And, most importantly, it takes on the current feminist movement — one often grounded in whiteness — and forces readers to recognize how that “fucks shit up for everybody.”

For you if: You prefer your life lessons delivered by someone else’s grandma.

Every teacher has at least one class that they need to watch at all times, and mine was fifth period English in 2011. They were the class that made substitutes cry, and that once knocked down the temporary wall separating my room from the one next door. One day, after I passed out pencils, I tried to put the extras down on the desk behind me without turning around. I missed and hit the edge of the desk, driving the freshly-sharpened tips straight into my own palm.

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I laughed when it happened. There was a hunk of graphite driven a quarter inch into my hand and a jagged flap of skin that I would later cut off with eyebrow scissors, and there was absolutely nothing I could do for the next sixty minutes. I stared straight into the bloody mess and let loose a cackle while the look on my students’ faces shifted from shock to horror. Then I put my thumb over the wound to stop the bleeding, and kept teaching.

In between that class period and the next one, I had four minutes to run to the bathroom. I stared at the sign above the sink warning me not to drink the water, and wondered if getting toxic water in an open cut was dangerous. That’s when I began to wonder what, exactly, I was doing with my life.

I hadn’t planned to be a teacher. But when I went home for Thanksgiving my senior year of college and told my grandmother my master plan—to write freelance for a local arts website while I volunteered with advocacy groups—it knocked the wind out of her. Then, for the first and only time in my life, she gave me clear instructions on what she expected me to do next. I needed to go to graduate school, she said. I needed to get a masters’ degree, and a stable job doing something that could actually support me.

Teaching was the most stable career I could think of. I got that masters’ degree, and a job outside of Washington, D.C. My professors had warned me that the first year would be hard, but what they hadn’t told me was that my brand new career was essentially a pressure cooker.

During my first faculty meeting, I found out that my new colleagues had not received a raise in three years. The administration gave the union a choice when the recession hit: either lay off teachers, or give up their raises for the foreseeable future. The union voted for the latter, not knowing that their wages would be frozen for the better part of a decade. Our school—one of the only low-income schools in an otherwise affluent district—was failing, and if we didn’t raise test scores people were going to start losing their jobs anyway. But the new principal had some big ideas, she told us, and we were going to do this together.

Her first idea was ending all out-of-class discipline. Research shows that students of color and students with disabilities are punished too often and too harshly, so we were going to stop as much punishment as we could. Any behavioral issues were to be addressed in the classroom, no matter how severe.

The next was to use lunch periods as extra tutoring time. Administrators called names in the cafeteria of any student with outstanding work or low test scores, and sent them back up to their teachers. Our lunches were at the same time, so we ate with students while they worked through assignments.

Then the school implemented a universal breakfast program. Most of our students already depended on school lunches, so offering breakfast doubled their chances to get something to eat. We didn’t have enough cafeteria staff to cover that, so breakfast happened in our classrooms too—our first-period students came in a half-hour earlier and ate in the rooms.

The new initiatives kept piling on: We added after-school tutoring, academic mentoring, and open office hours. Every single one of these ideas was good—every time we offered a new support, a few kids did a little bit better. But every single one of these ideas was also the sole responsibility of the teachers. By the end of the year I had students in my classroom for 12 hours a day, with no time to plan the next day’s lessons or grade papers until the last kid went home.

In theory, that type of schedule is exactly what a union is supposed to prevent. Our contract mandated breaks, planning periods, and additional staff in the classrooms to support students with disabilities. But our union was doing its best to keep its members employed in the face of a budget crunch—dealing with contract violations was a luxury. So our list of responsibilities kept growing until teachers buckled under the pressure.

The teacher across the hall from me didn’t even last through October. He quit in the middle of the week, and the rest of us took turns covering his schedule for two months while the district tried to find a replacement. That spring, the state was granted a waiver that exempted us from the punishments that we could have faced if the school didn’t make enough progress. Even so, a third of us didn’t come back the following year. Some, like me, switched careers. Others transferred schools, and some retired. The school administrators had the summer to scramble and fill all those open jobs—still for the same pay, because the salary freeze was entering its fourth year.

Seven years later, many teachers still haven’t gotten relief. Districts across the country are still struggling to recover from the housing crisis that wiped out their tax base. On top of this, federal spending for K-12 education has been cut by almost 20 percent since 2011, and states have struggled to make up the difference. Seven states—Arizona, Idaho, Kansas, Michigan, Mississippi, and Oklahoma—poured gas on the fire by enacting income tax cuts post-recession rather than restoring education funding. With the exception of Michigan, teacher salaries in these states are among the lowest in the nation.

Now, for the first time in a generation, schools are being closed with a series of wildcat strikes. Because of course they are. Teaching has always been difficult, but years of funding cuts are making it impossible. After pleading with lawmakers for support, striking is the only thing left that makes sense. That’s why West Virginia closed down every school in the state for 12 days, and it’s why Oklahoma might follow suit.

Given how normalized mass protests have become under the Trump administration, it’s worth remembering that this is genuinely radical: striking by public employees is forbidden by statute in 26 states. During the West Virginia strike, the state’s Attorney General made it clear that he believed the work stoppage was “unlawful,” though it seems superintendents have chosen not to punish participants.

That’s because superintendents know something lawmakers still haven’t grasped: Teachers make their living by getting people to pay attention. So when they say they can’t do their jobs anymore without more money and more support, and state legislators respond by jamming their fingers in their ears and passing yet another tax cut, teachers will do what it takes to be heard.

Under the proposal, households receiving $90 or more per month in Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits—which accounts for the vast majority of all of the households who currently participate in SNAP—will receive a portion of their assistance in the form of a box of pre-selected food. According to the USDA, which would be responsible for administering the program, the box would be filled with items like pastas, peanut butter, beans, and canned fruit, intended to “improve the nutritional value of the benefit provided and reduce the potential for EBT fraud.”

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In effect, the proposal is a paternalistic spin on Blue Apron: Instead of being able to choose food based on their nutritional and family needs, SNAP households may get standardized boxes of food that the government chooses on their behalf. Hunger and nutrition experts have panned this as “costly, inefficient, stigmatizing, and prone to failure.” A 2016 USDA study found no evidence to suggest that households who receive food stamps need the government to select their food for them—their spending habits are almost identical to other households. (The only exception is baby food—SNAP households buy a lot more of it, because they’re twice as likely to have a child under age 3.) Replacing the food that people are buying for themselves with pastas and canned fruit is likely a nutritional downgrade. And, since the food is being delivered directly to families, it’s unclear whether families will get the opportunity to provide input based on allergies or specific nutritional needs—say, to account for a peanut allergy, or for all that baby food.

As for reducing EBT fraud, the Trump Administration is offering a complicated solution for a nonexistent problem: SNAP fraud is extremely rare, and the government spends about as much money looking for SNAP fraud as it actually finds in misused funds. (As a point of comparison, the Pentagon misplaces enough money every year to fund the entire SNAP program twice.)

What’s more likely is that the proposal will become a giveaway to major agriculture companies. Creating this type of program will require a massive number of new government contracts for food, shipping, storage, and delivery. These contracts will have volume requirements that smaller farms will not be able to meet, but they’ll open the door wide to America’s “Big Ag” lobbyists—including those with close ties to Trump’s Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue.

And given that this proposal is paired with a $214 billion cut over the coming decade—nearly one-third of total SNAP spending—as well as punishing time limits for workers who cannot find a job or get enough hours at work, it’s hard to believe this proposal is anything but malicious.

Considering Trump’s past statements on food stamps—and on poverty in general—it’s likely that malice actually is at the core of this. Remember the time that he said the only reason a protestor could be angry that he was talking about food stamps was because the protestor was fat? Or the time he said he “just doesn’t want a poor person” involved in decisions about the economy? The president sees his own wealth as the chief validator of his societal worth, and believes it makes him perfectly qualified to make choices about how low-income people live their lives. This SNAP proposal is the result of that line of thinking. It strips people of control over one of their most basic decisions—what they’re going to eat—and hands it over to a government agency. It flattens out the shades of humanity that go into our food—the garlic or chilis or cumin or fish sauce we use when we need to make dinner feel more like home, or the choice to splurge on a steak for your wife’s birthday dinner even if it means you’ll be scraping by for the rest of the month—and it replaces them with cans of fruit in a cardboard box.

I sent the post to my little brother, a well-coiffed yuppie who organizes most of his social life around food, and asked what he thought about the recipe. “I don’t know,” he replied. “Ham’s still hard for me.”

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With consistent refrigeration, a baked spiral ham will stay fresh for three to five days. That’s when its color shifts from a cheerful pink to a dull grayish-green, as the preservatives begin to buckle under the pressure of prolonged oxygen exposure. After a few more days, it starts to develop a thick, snot-like slime. That’s the bacteria breaking down sugars in the meat, as the decay sets in for real.

Most people throw their food out well before they have to confront this arc in the circle of life. But most people aren’t starving. If you are, you learn to wash the slime off—under hot running water, with soap if you need it—and hope for the best.

There was a point before the weeks of rotting ham, or months of tortillas and processed cheese, when I could have asked for help. I didn’t.

I had already been fat for my entire life. When I was born, my baby cheeks were so big that they squeezed my eyes shut for the first three months of my infancy. As a kid, I was the worst-case scenario in every game of “would you rather.” I was also stable, smart, and well-adjusted—except that I was miserable. That’s what being fat does: It swallows up everything you do right and hides it in the giant failure that is your body. For women in particular, being fat is such a colossal fuck up that it squeezes out the room to be anything else: Being fat and isn’t an option. (The only exception is being fat and funny, if you manage to be in on the joke of your own fatness.)

By the time I was a teenager, I had learned how to avoid anything that would draw attention to my body: to wear clothes that hid my size, to avoid activities where people looked at me, and above all to hide the fact that I ever ate.

Hiding your eating is tricky in the best of circumstances—there are only so many times that you can just “not be hungry” during lunch, and there’s a thin line between tapping your pen just loud enough to cover the sound of your stomach growling and actually doing desktop drumrolls during Math class. But hiding your eating and asking for help getting enough food is actually impossible: You have to admit that you eat to tell someone you don’t eat enough. And I couldn’t do it.

Instead, my little brothers and I made it five years without setting eyes on a vegetable, eating stale scraps and spoiled meat. It sounds almost foolish now—like we were undone by our own vanity. But the truth is, society uses appearance as a shortcut to determining value. Thin is good; fat is bad. Fat people know that. We are acutely aware that we are considered lazy, weak-willed, and even incompetent—doubly so if we’re also poor.  But humans simply can’t endure being told we’re terrible all of the time. So we avoid situations where that’s likely to happen.

It turns out the stigma against being fat is so intense that it stops people from getting health care, exercising in public, or interacting with other people. For me, that also included finding someone who could help me get food. I knew what I would be up against—what it would take to convince someone I was telling the truth—and I didn’t have the energy. I had homework to do, power to get turned back on, and college essays to write.

Eventually, through no work of my own—I’ll cut off my own feet before anyone ever turns me into a “pulled herself up by the bootstraps” folk hero—the food available to me got better. It got more plentiful. It got healthier. I stayed fat. And now that I’m okay—now that I have water, and heat, and trash pickup—that’s fine. I have the luxury of rejecting the idea that the things that society says give me value—like thinness and prettiness and obedience—mean anything. Because right now, my survival isn’t tied quite so closely to whether or not other people think I deserve to be alive.

That brief moment of optimism—the hope that maybe, just maybe, House Republicans had done something that would help me—didn’t last long. Turns out they aren’t particularly worried about this middle-class lady. The dreams I’ve held closest to me—the ones I want so desperately that I can barely even admit them to myself—could be completely dashed by this plan.

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My wife doesn’t dream in secret like I do. She’s pretty transparent. And what she wants, more than anything, is to be a parent.

Deep down, she’s a dad. She thinks instructions are for quitters, she plays air guitar while she dances, and she laughs—hard—at her own jokes. She asks me every time she puts on sunglasses if she looks “like a cool kid,” and I once watched her use finger guns as an earnest form of praise for someone who had just finished a particularly difficult parking job. (It was on our wedding day. I married her anyway.)

I always thought of her weird-dad behavior as an eccentricity. It’s sweet that she manages our budget for fun, that she wants to be the house with the best candy on Halloween, and that she’ll spend an entire dinner party trying to hang a friend’s bike rack. But this year, something started to shift. She started to really want a baby to go with all of those paternal affectations.

At first she’d just make faces at little kids that were staring her down. Then she started to get wistful any time she saw a baby with unruly hair. And earlier this week, she came home from the grocery store yelling that we needed to move because our house barely got any trick-or-treaters, but there were dozens of little kids in costumes just two blocks up.

I always knew in the back of my mind that this was going to happen. I was ambivalent about kids, but I could tell—even when she swore it wasn’t true—that my wife needs to be a parent. So, we started to factor those imaginary future kids into our choices. We bought a little house with too many bedrooms in a good school district. We got a car with extra room in the back, and a dog with a particular soft spot for babies.

This summer, I started to feel it, too. It snuck up on me—I was sitting on my sofa, laptop in my lap, and I suddenly found myself wishing that there was a sleeping infant on my chest. I texted my wife and told her I was ready to adopt.

That’s just the first step in a years-long process. When you’re queer, having a baby is complicated. Just finding one—whether you’re looking for raw ingredients or a finished product—is extremely expensive.  But there are actually breaks written into the tax code that help us out: little gifts from a government that has spent generations marginalizing families like ours. Need in vitro fertilization to conceive with your donor sperm? You can deduct some of the medical expenses from your tax bill. Plan to adopt? There’s a sizable credit to make it affordable.

Except, now there isn’t. The House Republican tax plan is filled with delicious treats for the wealthy: repealing the estate tax, cutting corporate tax rates, and notching down the top income tax rate. And to help pay for it, Congressional Republicans have cobbled together a list of credits to eliminate so obscenely cruel it would make Ayn Rand blush. The credits for individuals over 65 or who are retired on disability are gone, and the deduction for teachers—the one that helped me afford all the pencils and notebooks I bought for my students when I worked in public schools—has vanished. The deduction for paying high local taxes—like the ones my wife and I pay in order to live in that good school district—has been whittled away.

And the deductions and credits that would have made it possible for me to afford having a child? They’re gone, too.

Without those deductions and credits, my wife and I won’t be able to have children. We cannot afford the upfront cost of adopting or conceiving, combined with the costs of preparing to bring a child into our home and the child care we would need for the next several years. We’ve done the math—by the time we scrape the money together, we’ll be too old for most adoption agencies to consider us and it’s unlikely we’ll be able to conceive.

And so, with a single tax bill, House Republicans have denied the love of my life the chance to have the family she desperately wants. And they’ve done it so the loves of their lives—corporations and the ultra-rich—can have something they don’t even need.

My mind still flashes back to my hometown every time news of a shooting breaks, even though Tomasz was killed almost five years ago. It was early on Christmas Eve in 2012 when a man set his family home on fire and shot the firefighters who responded to the blaze from a berm across the street. He used the same model of assault rifle that was used in the Sandy Hook massacre two weeks earlier.

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I found out Tomasz was dead on Twitter. I had been watching footage of my town burning for hours, hoping that I didn’t know the people who had been killed. Then a local reporter tweeted a picture of a piece of notebook paper where she had scrawled the names of the victims. She spelled Tomasz’s first and last name wrong, with “ch”s where there should have been “z”s and “k”s, but that felt almost appropriate. His Polish name had confused people for his entire life—at least 25 percent of people responded “bless you” when he introduced himself, and when teachers struggled with the pronunciation during roll call his entire class used to shout his name in unison.

Our town was never particularly pro-gun, but after Tomasz was murdered we became fierce advocates for gun control. And about three weeks after his death, New York State had a new gun-control law to show for it—with a special provision that makes the penalty for murdering a first responder life in prison without parole. It was lauded in New York City, and Albany, and even my hometown, but once you step over the county line, “Repeal the SAFE Act” signs dot the front lawns. There, the law is viewed with a mix of indignation and hostility—an encroachment on a centuries-old way of life of people who genuinely don’t believe their guns are part of the problem.

I’m a product of that side of the county line, too. My grandfather taught me and my brothers how to shoot tin cans and milk jugs before Thanksgiving dinner when I was ten years old. He thought of guns as a tool, and grumbled instructions with the same matter-of-fact directness he used when he taught me how to change an alternator. I’m still not a great shot—I hit low, because I drop my arm—but I’m competent. That was important to my grandpa—he respected that my brothers and I were nervous nerds, but he needed us to be able to fend for ourselves.

Grandpa made the only joke I ever remember him telling during that shooting lesson. One of my little brothers was telling a story, and—forgetting that there was a pistol in his left hand—he flailed his little eight-year-old arms towards Grandpa’s torso while his index finger was still on the trigger. My grandfather pushed the barrel of the gun back toward the ground and flipped the safety on before chuckling, “Be careful where you point that thing—my flesh is very tender, and doesn’t much like being shot.”

That’s the thing about guns—no one much likes being shot. But last year, 33,594 Americans were killed by guns—5,000 more than the number of people who died from prostate cancer. We’ve changed the way we practice medicine to make sure those cancer patients get the treatment they need—but guns, not so much.

The trouble with guns is that they were designed to kill, and they do it more readily than anything else we’ve created for the job. Even people who grew up with them—who think of them as tools, and respect their inherent danger—know that. That’s why they were written into our constitution, and that’s why we cling to them. It’s because that power—the power to kill—is a thing white Americans feel entitled to.

And it is, to be clear, white (mostly male) Americans who are worried about our guns. We are 80 percent more likely than black Americans, and 157 percent more likely than Hispanic Americans, to prize gun access over gun safety. That level of concern spiked right after Obama was elected, and in the years following the top reason gun owners cited for having a weapon switched from “hunting” to “safety.” That’s also when, as Bill O’Reilly put it, white folks started to realize that it might not be “a traditional America anymore.”

Over the centuries, white Americans have felt entitled to a lot. We’ve felt entitled to usurp land, and to lay waste to human bodies, and to enrich ourselves by exploiting others. We have been forced, very slowly, to recognize that those things aren’t our right. None of it has been graceful—we fought wars for land and slavery, rioted for segregation, and elected a white supremacist in response to our first black president—but eventually we can shake this part of our history loose, too. Just because guns are a part of our legacy, that doesn’t mean they have to be a part of our future.

I have to believe that we can realize that. Because the alternative—that we keep bleeding American lives just to prove that we can—is too gruesome to bear.

The reasons Trump cited to support his decision are pretty thin. He claimed that the military couldn’t possibly shoulder the medical costs, even though the military spends 50 times as much money on bands as it would on health care for trans servicemembers. He also noted that allowing transgender servicemembers would be a “disruption,” which is a pretty weighty claim to make on behalf of a force of people who are trained to deal with actual explosions.

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This announcement is, of course, a direct attack on the rights of trans Americans who are already serving in the military. It will force them back into the closet, make it impossible for them to get adequate health care, leave them vulnerable to assault, or rob them of their livelihoods. It’s also an attack on trans Americans who aren’t serving. It’s a clear statement about the value the government places on their skills, and on their lives.

American rhetoric tends to talk about servicemembers as if they’re all Captain America: Hyperpatriotic superheroes fighting evil for no reason besides their love of country. To be clear, servicemembers are often heroic, and they do a brutally difficult job. But at the end of the day, they’re doing just that: a job. And it’s a good job, with a livable wage that often provides housing and access to higher education. The catch—and it’s a big one—is that in exchange for that job, servicemembers have to be willing to trade the government their lives.

LGBT Americans have been making this trade with the government for generations. There isn’t much data on LGBT Americans in the military, at least in part because there isn’t much data on LGBT Americans at all. But many of us know there’s a home for us there, the same way we just know that Tegan and Sara’s new records will never be quite as good as “The Con.”

My high school best friend knew it. It wasn’t easy to be queer where we grew up—families tend to stick around our Rust Belt town for generations, and their old Catholic hearts are slow to change. Most folks meet social shifts with denial or quiet disapprovals, but his parents were the type of Christian who thought they could save us from ourselves. They tried to save him from his gayness every chance they got. First they tried sneaking up on him any time he left the house—including at least one incident that involved hiding in bushes—to manufacture public confrontations that were halfway between impromptu sermon and public exorcism. When they realized they couldn’t literally scare him straight, they cut him off financially. It was better to have no son than to have raised a queer.

He dropped out of college when his parents cut him off. He didn’t have the money he needed to get a degree, so he did what young Americans in need of a career have done for hundreds of years: He joined the military.

Trans Americans desperately need to have that option available to them. According to a report by the Movement Advancement Project and the Center for American Progress, half of transgender Americans earn less than $24,000 per year. One-third of black trans women earn less than $10,000 per year. Trans Americans are more likely to be rejected by their families, to be homeless, and to be forced into underground economies than the rest of the population. In some ways, that makes the military—a career that comes with a built-in family—a particularly good option for a lot of trans Americans. That option is something that trans Americans, as citizens of this country, are entitled to pursue. And it’s something that President Trump promised both LGBT Americans and veterans that he would support.

Whether Trump keeps his promises or not, trans Americans are going to fight for this country. They’ll do it in the military, even though the president just issued a declaration that orders them back in the closet. And they’ll do it right in front of the White House, with their signs raised and their heads held high, when the president tries to stop them.

On the one hand, I can’t think of anything more American than responding to a mass shooting with a bill that suggests that everyone should remember to say “please” and “thank you.” But on the other, Ryan’s plea that we all just calm down—that we not “base our arguments on emotion” and instead “have a great debate on ideas and principles”—feels like a willful misunderstanding of the stakes that this administration has created.

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In the past six months, this administration has pushed hard to dismantle the health care system. It is rolling back financial and environmental regulations, undercutting public schools, and hacking away at the legal system. It has been actively hostile to immigrants, tried to defund Planned Parenthood, and responded to the police shootings of 547 Americans by suggesting that the officers “choked.” These aren’t “ideas and principles” that we can chat about while we wait for someone to tap the next keg. They’re people’s lives. These policies will be felt intensely, and immediately, by the people that Speaker Ryan governs. And as long as the stakes are this high, I—respectfully—decline to be polite.

Politeness is a luxury, and it’s one that most Americans cannot afford. Polite people can raise their hand and wait quietly, confident that they will be called on and have their voices heard. But most of us never get called on. So what Paul Ryan is seeing—what is bubbling to the surface in the absence of politeness—is anger. This administration’s policies are forcing people to fight for their lives, and we are really, really mad.

Our anger gives us power. Anger allows us to demand attention instead of just hoping for it, which makes it one of the best vehicles that citizens have to exercise their rights in a representative democracy. Anger brings millions of Americans to a march in the middle of winter, it fuels them as they climb to the top of a 270-foot crane, it keeps them on-message even when they are under arrest and being dragged away without their wheelchairs.

Our anger makes Paul Ryan uncomfortable, so he is framing it as if we are out of control. It’s a centuries-old tactic to dismiss and discredit our rage. We saw it when Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) was silenced for reading a letter, and when Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) was told her questions were too aggressive. We see it when a protest is called a riot, and when a politician refuses to engage with a constituent who is “too emotional.”

So I am sorry, Speaker Ryan, if you don’t like the way we’re talking. But we don’t like the way you’re governing, and we’re going to make you listen to what we have to say about it.

We both knew we were queer in our early teens, making the odds pretty low that we’d ever end up romantically involved. But we almost got married anyway, because our parents couldn’t (or wouldn’t) help us pay for our sophomore years of college. My financial aid advisor told me marriage was the least-bad way that we could make ourselves legally independent — our other choices were “join the military” or “be 24” — so we got engaged during winter break.

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Jon’s parents had cut him off financially when he came out. Not all at once — they forced him out of their lives in fits and starts. They’d have a family dinner, then shove him through the glass in the living room window; take a vacation, then have him arrested for grand theft auto when he drove the family car back to school. Eventually they told him that he had to choose: be straight and get help paying tuition, or be gay and try to make it on his own. It wasn’t much of a choice.

My own mother was too consumed with her own demons to be particularly worried about mine. By the time I was in college, we’d gone five years without trash pickup or steady electricity. Our house had been foreclosed and my little brothers were legally squatters in our childhood home, biding their time until the bank came to claim it. When I finally called my mom to tell her I was pretty sure I’d need to leave my dream school if we didn’t figure something out, she stayed lucid just long enough to tell me to get a different dream. Then she started slurring her words, and I hung up the phone.

By then, Jon and I had been each other’s family for two years. He drove me to school and to the doctor; he slept at my house sometimes, and helped us clean up what was left of it when we finally got evicted.

When it comes to queer families, we’re pretty unremarkable. LGBT people are much more likely than straight people to cobble together ad hoc support networks — our chosen families. We’re more likely to be poor or rejected by our biological families, so we make our own families in order to survive. We’ve been doing this for as long as anyone can remember — from the romantic friendships and Boston marriages of the 1800s; to the house and ball culture that took root in the 1960s; to me and Jon, and our teen-marriage plan of December 2007.

These families are very real, but the law isn’t made for people like us. With just a handful of recent exceptions, we can’t get time off work to take care of each other if we’re sick, or give each other health insurance. The only way we can make the law work for us is by bending it a little to match our realities — through adult adoptions or, say, marrying your best friend.

That kind of legal status matters. It makes a practical financial impact on people’s lives. But there’s more to it than that. When the government acknowledges that your family is valid, it legitimizes your worth. It’s not a coincidence that teen suicide attempts dropped after same-sex marriage was legalized.

Jon and I didn’t end up getting married. A few months after we got engaged, Jon met a nice boy and we rethought our plans. He joined the Navy, and I staged one-person sit-ins in my dean’s office until I annoyed him into bending the rules to give me financial aid. I quit writing — the only thing I’d ever been sure I was good at — and found a job teaching so I could pay the bills.

Jon never finished college, and I have six figures worth of student debt. The fallout from that will shape the rest of our lives — and it’s from choices we never should have had to make, but did, when we were 18 years old.

That claim is objectively false.

Meals on Wheels serves more than 2 million seniors every year who aren’t able to shop and cook for themselves. Research on home-delivered meal programs shows that they improve diet, nutrition, and quality of life, and reduce food insecurity among participants. In short, when seniors get meals, they’re healthier. My casual field research—otherwise known as every conversation I’ve ever had with my grandparents—also backs this up. If you don’t feel well, you should eat something.

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I’m guessing, based on Mulvaney’s argument that cutting the program’s funding is the “compassionate” thing to do, that he hasn’t watched someone nearly die from malnutrition. But I have.

My grandmother had the dubious honor of being the only person to check into her hospice house two separate times.

The second time she was admitted, she spent a month fighting off the beleaguered staff’s attempts at kindness while she settled into an uncharacteristically peaceful death. She wasn’t an easy woman to care for during her life, and she wasn’t any different when she was dying. Once, when a hospice worker took her outside to spend some time in the sun, she dismissed the house’s small garden as “prissy bullshit.” When a volunteer dropped a curler during an attempt to wash and set her hair, she snapped that she “didn’t have that much time left, and didn’t want to waste it fumbling around.” When a grief counselor asked her what she’d miss about her life, she answered “gimlets and a fucking cigarette.”

We held her memorial service in the same room that she died in—another first for the house’s staff. When the nurse leading the service offered us the opportunity to share a warm memory about her life, we all shifted uncomfortably in our seats as we struggled to think of one. My aunt finally broke the silence with a long story about my grandmother’s legendarily mean tortoiseshell cat, Cleo, who lashed out at anyone within striking distance.

My aunt didn’t mention her plan to have Cleo euthanized shortly after the service.

Two years earlier, when my grandmother was admitted to that hospice the first time, she only stayed for two weeks. What we had been convinced were signs that she was nearing death—exhaustion, weakness, confusion—turned out to be malnutrition. After a few healthy meals, they sent her back home, and we made sure someone went to her trailer at least once a day to check that she ate and to ration out just enough scotch to keep her withdrawal tremors at bay.

My grandma survived those two years between hospice stays because my aunts split up the responsibility of taking care of her. If they hadn’t been able to do that, I can only hope that Meals on Wheels would have been around to help her before she slipped back to the place where hunger made it impossible to finish a sentence, or stand up from the kitchen table, or put in her dentures.

In other words, I hope Meals on Wheels would have been there to show a mean old lady some compassion.