Some Things Were Never Supposed to Be for Sale

I’ve survived things I’m not going to list here, because the list isn’t the point, and I’m tired of the list being the point.

For most of my life, the story I was handed about survival sounded like this: you made it - look how strong you are! The odds were terrible, and you beat them! So the moral of the story is me. My grit. My spine. My refusal to lie down.

For a long time, I let people believe that and tell me so, because it’s flattering, because I am stubborn as hell, and because there is a sliver of truth in it.

But for a long time now, I’ve come to think that story is a trap. Because if my survival proves how strong I am, then somebody else’s not surviving proves something about them, too. That’s the conclusion, whether we say it out loud or not. The bootstraps story has always been quietly cruel: the people who don’t make it must have been missing something.

But when I look at my own story now, I don’t think, look how strong I am. I think the Hunger Games odds fucking suck, and they are the problem. The odds were always the problem.

And I don’t mean natural odds; not the ordinary brutal friction of being a human in an impersonal, morally indifferent world, in a body that is vulnerable and made to die. Those are facts, and honestly, it’s OK. A life with no friction is no life at all. I’m not asking anybody to sand the world down to nothing.

What I am asking is why we keep manufacturing odds that don’t need to exist. Why do we keep adding extra cruelty on top of the cruelty that comes free with being alive?

Once I started asking that, I couldn’t stop… and it undid my politics.

We treat things that are not commodities like commodities, and it is poisoning everything. It’s the disease our world is dying of.

Listen, some things are fine as commodities. Cars. Sneakers. Restaurants. Whatever. The marketplace is a genuinely good tool for a whole category of stuff - the stuff where competition makes things better, where your preferences and mine can differ, and where nobody dies if you can’t afford the fancy version. You want a hundred cool cars? Knock yourself out. I don’t care because that’s not where the rot is.

The rot is that we took the marketplace logic - the “how does this benefit me” logic - and smeared that shit over everything. Over the things that were never supposed to be for sale.

Healthcare is not a commodity, but it’s become one. Before Reagan, the idea was that medicine was a social good - you build the system to deliver the best care, full stop. Then we turned it into an industry, and an industry has to make a profit. And the way you make a profit in healthcare is by not paying for care.

The market logic that drives a car company to build a better car also drives a health insurer to deny your claim. Same logic. Opposite result. Because the “product” isn’t a car, it’s whether a sick person gets to live or not, and you cannot run that through a profit machine without the machine deciding some people are too expensive to keep alive.

Education is not a commodity. An educated nation asks better questions. It solves problems other nations can’t even see yet. It is the single most important thing a country can build, yet we turned it into a luxury good, then loaded a generation with debt for the crime of wanting to learn. That is insane. That is a country eating its own future because the future didn’t show up with a good line of credit.

The planet is not a commodity. This one makes me want to scream. We are poisoning the air, the water, and the soil - the actual substrate of being alive - because there is short-term money in poisoning it, and the invoice won’t come due until after the people who profited are dead.

Seriously, what is the fucking point of a hundred cool cars on a planet that’s killing us? What are we even doing? Stewardship of the air, water, and the ground we stand on should be the one thing nobody’s allowed to argue about, but instead it’s a line item.

It’s all so blatantly narcissistic. And what’s worse is that this narcissism isn’t a personality flaw in a few bad people. It’s systemic. It’s how we’ve structured our whole world. We built a killing machine that asks one question—how will this benefit me?—and then we point it at everything, including things that only work when you ask a different question entirely. We’ve raised a whole civilization that can’t think past its own appetite and call it “normal.”

Well, it’s not fucking normal. We’ve just gotten used to it.

This is the part where I’m supposed to tell you which team to join. But I can’t, because none of them fit. For example:

The Libertarians. I’ll be glib for one second, and then I’ll be fair. To me, they read like educated sociopaths - they’re Republicans who take two joyless hours to explain what an uneducated Republican will scream at you in one sentence. The honest core of libertarianism is “leave me alone,” which I actually have some sympathy for. But it sours, because “leave me alone” with no limit becomes “I owe you nothing,” and a society where nobody owes anybody anything is just survival-of-the-fittest with a philosophy degree. It’s the commodity disease in its purest form. Everything is a transaction. Even your neighbor. Even a drowning kid, if helping him cuts into your margin. No, thank you.

MAGA. I don’t have an analysis here because there isn’t one to have. It’s lost. It’s a grievance with a gun, the serial numbers filed off, pointed at whoever they’re told to point it at this week. There’s real pain underneath it - people who got hollowed out by exactly the commodity machine I’m describing - but it’s been captured and turned into a weapon against the very people who share that pain the most. There’s nothing to engage with. There’s only damage and sick zealotry.

The Democrats. This is the one that actually hurts, because I was one. A liberal Democrat, the whole time. I won’t pretend they’re a monolith, because they’re not - there are people in the party doing real work. But waaayy too many of them are corporate politicians first and public servants a distant second, more committed to keeping their big donors happy than to doing the obviously right thing. As for the rest, they’re spineless. They had so many opportunities to bring the fight to the mat, but instead, they sent a strongly worded fundraising email. After this last election, watching non-action politicians I’d once defended turn out to be pathetic corporate shills, something in me just fell away. I didn’t decide to become a leftist. I got pushed.

The DSA. Which is where the push landed, and where I want to be honest in both directions.

What I love about them is simple: they’re actually doing something for people. Not for donors. For people. They don’t take corporate money. They refuse to play nice and fall in line. They are young, focused, and they hold a vision for America that places the working class at the center. And they organize between elections. They show up at the tenant meeting, the picket line, the ICE detention centers, the boring Tuesday-night thing that no camera covers. That’s the part that matters, and it’s the part I’d want any voter like me to actually learn from.

But do I buy into their whole platform? No. The deep-end stuff like public ownership of major industry, the more revolutionary planks, loses me, partly because I think pure socialism at the scale of a country this size genuinely doesn’t work, and partly because it breaks the electorate worse than it heals it. I’m also not looking to abolish markets. I’m looking to get markets out of the rooms they were never supposed to be in. That’s a different project, and it’s honestly closer to “some things aren’t for sale” than to any -ism.

But here’s where I stop being polite because I also see what they tolerate.

Graham Platner - the populist darling, Bernie’s endorsement, the whole left-media apparatus behind him - ran for Senate in Maine with a Nazi SS symbol tattooed on his chest. That came out, and they backed him. Reddit posts surfaced where he dismissed military sexual assault victims, ran his mouth about Black patrons, and sneered at rural and LGBTQ+ people. Again, they backed him. It came out that he’d sent sexually explicit messages to multiple women at the start of his marriage. He stayed, and so did the DSA. Reports surfaced about unsettling and threatening behavior toward past partners. The movement continued to stay with him, and not only that, they called the reporting oppo research and a hit job.

What finally moved them was not the Nazi tattoo. Not the on-record contempt for assault survivors, not the racism or homophobia. A named woman - a progressive Democrat herself, a woman who agrees with him on policy - went on the record that he forced himself on her in her own home while she said no. She brought receipts: a message to her therapist, texts from the time. Only then did the endorsements evaporate.

He’s gone now, or says he is — he announced he was suspending the campaign and, as of this writing, still hasn’t filed the paperwork. And the reason he’s leaving is not that a woman said he raped her. But because Schumer’s people said the party wouldn’t spend a dollar in Maine with his name on the ballot. He said so himself: no money, no voter data, no campaign. He made sure to say his exit “most certainly is not” an admission of guilt, and that the establishment was using the allegation as an excuse. Eleven minutes of DARVO on display on video, where the woman is a weather event that happened to him. So he leaves as a martyr, and the movement gets to believe it was mugged rather than that it spent months defending a man it should have dropped at the tattoo. Nobody has to learn anything.

In ways that matter, they are not all that fucking different from MAGA. Because the bar for them wasn’t “don’t run a man with a Nazi symbol on his body and a documented history of degrading women and minorities.” The bar was “credible public rape allegation with corroboration.” Everything underneath that line was survivable. A price worth paying for a mediocre man who polls well.

That’s the thing I can’t get past. They abandoned him at the end, and I’d give them credit for it if conscience had moved them instead of Chuck Schumer’s checkbook. It’s the months of tolerance before the end. It’s what they were willing to look the other way about and who they were willing to throw under the bus to win a seat. Women. Black voters. Queer people. Assault survivors. All of it was negotiable right up until it became a liability. And a political group that uses people as objects until the objects cost them something is narcissistically reprehensible, no matter what side of the political spectrum they’re on.

And while I’m being straight, let’s talk about where the DSA got its method. The thing I love about them - showing up between elections, the tenant meeting, the picket line, the boring Tuesday nobody films - Black organizers were doing that before the DSA existed, before most of its members were born. Ella Baker built it; she’s the one who insisted that movements are made from the bottom up, not handed down from charismatic men at podiums. Fannie Lou Hamer got beaten half to death in a Mississippi jail cell for the crime of registering voters. Yes, it’s braided together with the labor movement, and I’m not going to pretend it’s one clean line, but the beating heart of American bottom-up organizing is Black, and it always has been.

But when Black people organized exactly this way, it was called radical. It was called dangerous. It got them surveilled, infiltrated, imprisoned, and killed. When the DSA organizes this way, it’s called a movement. It gets a podcast circuit, a favorable New York Times profile, and a bench of promising young candidates.

A movement that is white enough gets a tolerance budget. It can absorb a Nazi tattoo and months of documented contempt for women, for Black patrons, for queer people, and still be treated as a serious political project with a serious candidate. Imagine, just try, a Black-led organization running a candidate with an SS symbol inked on his chest. Imagine how many hours it survives. There is no version of that story where anybody gets months and the benefit of the doubt.

They took the method and left the people. They learned to organize from a tradition Black Americans built out of necessity and blood, and then, when it came time to decide what was negotiable, Black voters went on the list. Along with women. Along with queer people. Along with survivors. You don’t get to inherit the tools and disown the toolmakers. The fight for civil rights, for women, for the most vulnerable among us, isn’t parsley you add to the dish when it’s convenient and scrape off when it’s expensive. That fight lifts all boats, or it lifts none - and it started in the boat everybody else was happy to leave behind.

And I have to talk about the antisemitism, because as a Jew, I’m not going to pretend I don’t see it.

There’s a real critique of AIPAC and its hold on American politicians, and it’s the same critique I’ve been making this entire essay: money buys disproportionate power over our democracy, and a lobby with deep pockets can bend our politics toward outcomes most of us never chose. That argument is legitimate; it stands on its own, and I understand why people on the left make it loudly: it’s simply true. I extend my understanding that far, but not one inch past it.

But here’s what the DSA has actually done with it. At their 2025 national convention, they made anti-Zionism a formal membership test - support the boycott of Israel, or you don’t get endorsed; align yourself with the wrong organization, and you can be expelled. They pulled their endorsement of AOC over her saying that denying Israel’s right to exist is a form of antisemitism. They moved to censure her for a vote to fund a missile-defense system that shoots down rockets. Voting to intercept rockets: punishable.

Meanwhile, a candidate they helped lift into office turned out to have promoted The International Jew - Henry Ford’s Nazi-beloved fantasy about a global Jewish conspiracy. When a reporter asked her about it, she told him to “get your rabbi.” A caucus inside the organization cheered the murder of a young Jewish couple in DC as “resistance.”

If we look at what’s punished and what’s allowed, we see what a movement values. An Iron Dome vote gets you censured. The International Jew gets you a shrug and a “well, we didn’t formally endorse her.” Same thing as Platner. How fast a movement moves tells you what it actually cares about.

I will give the DSA credit: the national organization condemned the DC murders and distanced itself from the caucus that celebrated them. Good. That’s a line, and they drew it. But a movement that will excommunicate you for a defensive-missile vote but can barely rouse itself over a Rothschild pamphlet or Nazi tattoo is showing you where its values lie.

So no. I don’t extend grace that far. You can hold the real critique that money corrupts, AIPAC has too much power, our politicians are bought, and refuse, completely, the moment it curdles into the oldest lie in the world. Both. Always both. And when Jews watch supposed allies get comfortable with The International Jew, we are allowed to say that the comfort is the problem, not the fact that we’re noticing it.

No more funding genocide - in Gaza, the Sudan, or anywhere else. Period.

Overturn Citizens United. Immediately. Political access is not a commodity, and the second we let it become one, every other fight is rigged before it starts.

Healthcare back to what it was meant to be - a social program built to deliver the best care, not a profit machine built to deny it.

Education needs to be affordable and subsidized, because an educated nation is a nation that survives, and we are currently choosing to be stupid and ignorant on purpose.

The care and stewardship of the planet is treated as non-negotiable. Not a debate. Not a line item. The floor.

Term limits - Lifetime appointments have to go; no human should hold that much power for that long with no exit. The judicial case is airtight - staggered terms, no more nine people ruling from the grave. As for legislators, it’s trickier because, where term limits were tried, power sometimes just slid over to the lobbyists and the permanent staff, since the rookies never learned to fight them. So: judicial term limits, hell yes. Legislative ones, I want them done right, not just done. But the lifetime-fiefdom era needs to end either way.

And underneath all of it: a society where the most vulnerable person in it still has dignity and safety. Because that’s how we know if what we’re doing actually works.

None of that fits neatly in a box - I’ve checked. There is no party where I can show up and have all of that already on the shelf.

So here’s where I’ve landed, and it’s less tidy than “vote blue” or “join the DSA”:

The vote is the smallest thing I do. In a primary, it’s where I push hard, toward whoever’s actually doing something for people; in a general election, it’s defensive, it’s triage, it’s me deciding which damage I can live with, because those two votes do different jobs.

Realize that my vote will never fix the things I care about. That doesn’t mean I don’t vote. It means I recognize that Citizens United won’t fall just because I filled in a bubble. Healthcare probably won’t get decommodified by my one ballot. Those move through the boring, sustained, organized pressure that happens in all the rooms between elections - the exact thing the DSA is good at, the thing I can learn from them without signing onto their whole platform. The thing Black organizers taught them, and taught me.

The truth is, voting is not the entirety of my power; if it were, then I could just be quiet for the other 1,459 days. And that’s not going to happen.

While I don’t know exactly what will heal this country, I know the direction. We take the things that were never supposed to be for sale, and we get them the hell off the market. We stop asking “how does this benefit me” about the air, water, sick kids, students, and the vote itself.

And we stop, please just stop, mistaking survival for proof of worth. Mine or anyone’s. The shitty odds were never a test I passed. They are the problem, and problems can be solved.

That’s not optimism. I’m not an optimist. It’s just the only thing that follows from looking at it straight.

The Hunger Games odds suck. So let’s change the fucking odds.

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