Q REPORT 250: THE DECLARATION OF DEPENDENCE

When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the comforting lies which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth the dependent and debased station to which the laws of Disney, debt, petroleum, algorithm, empire, military procurement, private equity, medical bankruptcy, subscription entertainment, and commemorative truck stop eagle knives have reduced them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to remain strapped mouth-first to the great glowing Mickey Mouse teat, suckling blue light dollars from a poisoned cartoon udder, refreshing the app, checking the balance, saluting the flag, buying the commemorative cup, and praying to every dead president printed on cotton paper that the dollar does not finally reveal itself to be poorly absorbent toilet paper with delusions of empire.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all people are created equal, and are then immediately divided by zip code, credit score, school district, inherited wealth, insurance network, proximity to clean drinking water, and whether their parents knew how to turn suffering into generational advantage before the market closed. We hold that they are endowed by their Creator, or by chemistry, or by the cosmic accident of primordial ooze getting frisky in the tidal shallows, with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, all of which may be suspended pending verification of employment, proof of coverage, drug screening, algorithmic risk assessment, subscription renewal, and agreement to binding arbitration. We further hold that governments are instituted among human beings to secure these rights, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, except when the governed become troublesome, unionized, unhoused, indebted, sick, educated, queer, Black, poor, foreign, young, old, disabled, artistic, or otherwise inconvenient to the quarterly reporting.

We declare, therefore, our total dependence. We are dependent upon phones built by hands we will never hold, upon food systems we do not understand, upon trucks driving all night through deadly weather, upon antibiotics we cannot manufacture, upon water pipes installed by dead men, upon women whose names were never printed on the building, upon workers whose backs hold up the banquet while the owners explain sacrifice from the yacht. We are dependent upon teachers, nurses, janitors, cooks, clerks, drivers, electricians, daycare workers, farmers, custodians, garbage collectors, food shelf volunteers, librarians, secretaries, technicians, snowplow operators, public defenders, exhausted mothers, haunted fathers, and the uncounted army of people who arrive before the important people arrive so that the important people can believe the world magically works. And yet somehow, in this great and obvious web of mutual dependence, we have been trained to worship only the men who own the web, invoice the spider, patent the silk, poison the flies, and then charge admission to the feeding.

Whereas Uncle Sam appeared in the video at approximately 3:17 a.m., seated beneath a fluorescent light in a basement conference room somewhere triangulated between Langley, Orlando, and an Amazon fulfillment center. His hat was crooked. His beard was stained with barbecue sauce, tear gas, and snot. He looked directly into the camera and said, “My fellow Americans. I am alive. I am being treated as well as can be expected by the shareholders. Please do not attempt a rescue unless you are properly credentialed, pre-approved, and willing to pay the ransom. What? I mean deductible.” Behind him stood his captors: a health insurance executive with a clipboard, a defense contractor holding a golden shovel, a fossil fuel lobbyist wearing a child’s gas mask as a boutonniere, a tech billionaire with the empty eyes of a man who has mistaken optimization for love, and Mickey Mouse himself, swollen and immortal, smiling with the dead patience of an old god. Uncle Sam blinked three times, paused, and then read from the prepared statement. “Freedom has never been stronger. The markets are confident. The children are resilient. The water is locally sourced. The bombs are smart. The apps are free. The ads are relevant. The sacrifice is necessary. The shareholders are pleased.”

Whereas The American Dream was admitted to hospice shortly after sunrise, suffering from acute wage stagnation, chronic housing failure, metastatic medical debt, and a fireworks-related injury sustained while attempting to salute a bank. Doctors said the prognosis was uncertain, but only because the family requested optimism for insurance purposes. Around the bed gathered the old relatives: Opportunity wearing a paper gown, Hard Work with two slipped discs, Fair Play missing since 1987, Upward Mobility on oxygen, and Bootstraps, who had been dead for years but continued to appear on cable news as a silent expert witness. The American Dream opened one eye and tried to speak. Everyone leaned in. A lobbyist placed a microphone near its mouth. A banker held its hand for the photograph. A senator prepared a statement about resilience. At last the Dream whispered, “I was never a lottery ticket. I was a foundation.” Everyone pretended not to hear. A consultant suggested rebranding the foundation as premium aspiration infrastructure and charging poor people rent to stand on it.

Whereas when the Founding Fathers returned because America cannot process a single moral question without summoning powdered wig ghosts to ask whether the musket men intended TikTok, drone strikes, insulin pricing, fantasy football gambling, and the constitutional right of billionaires to own the atmosphere. George Washington emerged first, took one look around, and his wooden slave teeth fell from his mouth. Thomas Jefferson demanded legal counsel before answering any questions about liberty, property, architecture, or human beings he had previously fathered and then classified as property while writing about liberty. Benjamin Franklin seduced a drone, invented three new civic institutions, and asked where the nearest French delegation was hiding. John Adams screamed himself hoarse about executive power, then passed out when informed that the presidency had become a content farm operated by toady mascots and weak men with television poisoning. James Madison was handed a copy of the modern federal budget and immediately began chewing his own hands off. They were told America had treated their draft as scripture. They were horrified. “Draft?” asked the nation, clutching the parchment like a security blanket. “You mean this was not supposed to be laminated and used to justify every bad idea forever?” Madison looked into the middle distance and whispered, “We used feathers.”

Whereas outside, fireworks exploded over the mass grave of the common good. Red for the hospitals. White for the schools. Blue for the lakes we poisoned with flame retardant. Purple for the bruises. Gold for the billionaires who never have enough. Green for the money that matters more than oxygen. Silver for the polished cars of men who sell fear with patriotic music underneath. The crowd clapped because the explosions were beautiful, and it is hard not to love beautiful things even when they are funded by the forces killing you. Children looked up with faces full of wonder. Dogs shook under tables. Veterans flinched in the dark. The sky filled with smoke. The air smelled like celebration and battlefield. Somewhere a lake absorbed another evening of microplastic, beer foam, and national mythology. Somewhere a parent checked the price of groceries and decided which meal to skip. Somewhere a politician posted a picture of a flag large enough to hide behind. Somewhere a billionaire watched the whole thing from above, insulated by altitude and law.

Whereas America arrived eleven minutes late to couples therapy with itself, carrying a gas station flag, three lawsuits, a concealed pistol, a Stanley cup, another commemorative eagle knife, and a coupon for freedom fries that expired during the Bush administration. One America sat down and said, “I want clean water, safe schools, public health, affordable housing, libraries, labor rights, bodily autonomy, honest history, less war, more trees, and a future that does not require my children to develop emotional calluses before kindergarten.” The other America said, “I feel attacked.” The therapist, who was underpaid, out of network, and already fielding several subpoenas, asked the second America what it wanted. “Respect,” it said. “What does respect look like?” asked the therapist. “Obedience,” said the second America. “And freedom,” it added, after a pause. “What does freedom look like?” asked the therapist. “Obedience from others and consequence-free behavior for me.” The therapist wrote something down. It may have been a diagnosis. It may have been a grocery list. It may have been the beginning of a new constitution.

Whereas the bald eagle filed for divorce at noon. After two hundred and fifty years of being dragged into every speech, dealership commercial, fireworks tent, political ad, bad tattoo, knife catalog, military recruitment poster, and denim hallucination sold at a truck stop outside Branson, the eagle had retained counsel and wanted out. The petition cited irreconcilable differences, habitat destruction, toxic symbolism, emotional exhaustion, and repeated unauthorized use by men who could not identify three actual birds but owned seventeen flags. “I did not leave America,” the eagle wrote in a public statement released through its attorney. “America left the nest, paved the forest, poisoned the river, privatized the sky, and then asked me to keep screaming over a stock photo of troops and wheat.” The eagle further clarified that it had never endorsed tax cuts for billionaires, book bans, forever war, coal ash, deregulated banking, or putting its face on novelty swords sold to divorced uncles. “I am a bird,” it concluded. “I eat fish and mind my business. You people are the problem.”

Whereas there it was, the United States of Flinching, the richest and most armed frightened horse in human history, startled by every plastic bag of change. A nation with aircraft carriers afraid of librarians. A nation with nuclear weapons afraid of pronouns. A nation with satellites afraid of history. A nation with tanks afraid of college students. A nation with billionaires afraid of unions. A nation with police robots afraid of accountability. A nation with megachurches afraid of compassion. A nation with streaming services afraid of boredom. A nation with two-day shipping afraid of patience. A nation with military flyovers afraid of children asking why lunch costs money. The brave men screamed at drag queens. The patriots threatened school boards. The defenders of civilization melted down over beer cans, mermaids, bathrooms, candy, sneakers, kneeling athletes, library displays, and the unbearable tyranny of other people existing where they could be seen. They called it courage because courage was no longer recognizable.

Whereas then came Mickey Mouse, not the cartoon, not the cheerful rodent of childhood memory, not the dancing little anarchist from the black and white days before the lawyers built the castle. The fully evolved corporate deity, Mickey Enthroned, Mickey Incarnate, Mickey of the Infinite Renewal, Mickey with gloved hands on the valves of nostalgia, Mickey with theme park veins and litigation teeth, Mickey whose ears blot out the moon. “Come unto me,” said Mickey, “all ye who labor and are heavy laden, and I will sell you a coupon code.” The people came because they were tired. They came because the world hurt. They came because every child deserves wonder and every parent deserves a little mercy, even if the mercy costs $189 per day before food. They came to suckle the blue light dollar teat, the glowing stream of subscription dreams, the franchised memory milk of a childhood they were not sure they had enjoyed but were certain had been better than this. Mickey held them close, very close, (too close) and whispered, “You own nothing, but you may experience happiness in carefully managed emotional increments.”

Whereas somewhere inside the Treasury, the dollar looked at itself in the mirror and tried not to panic. It had enjoyed a good run. It had been king cotton, king oil, king bomb, king bank, king bribe, king sanction, king grocery, king prison, king campaign, king tuition, king ambulance, king rent, king app, king scam, king god. It had been folded into bras, hidden in Bibles, rained on dancers, laundered through islands, stacked in vaults, burned by artists, blessed by preachers, sniffed by traders, and promised to children who would never see enough of it. But lately the dollar had begun to suspect it was not money at all. Perhaps it was only belief wearing green. Perhaps it was a national hallucination with a watermark. Perhaps the empire had printed so many tiny portraits of dead men that the dead men had begun to rot through the paper. Perhaps, in the final accounting, the dollar would not become worthless in some dramatic crash, but slowly, humiliatingly, domestically, as rent ate it, medicine ate it, food ate it, war ate it, debt ate it, and what remained was too small to save and too stiff to wipe with.

Whereas in the bunker district, the billionaires practiced surviving the people they had exploited. They had purchased mountain holes, island fortresses, security teams, desalination systems, seed vaults, private doctors, underground farms, and enough preserved food to host an apocalypse-themed wedding for everyone they had ever pretended to care about. They had built arks without animals, castles without peasants, planets without atmosphere, and escape plans from the civilization that made them rich. They wanted to survive collapse, not prevent it. They wanted the ladder pulled up, polished, sanitized, and converted into a limited series. They wanted loyalty from guards whose families would be outside the blast doors. They wanted obedience from cooks whose children would be breathing acid. They wanted the world to end politely, with invoices paid and staff retained. Above all, they wanted the law to remain exactly what it had become for them: an abstract system affecting other people.

Whereas this is the central miracle of our age. A person can steal a sandwich and discover the immediate steel poetry of the state, but a person can steal a watershed, a pension fund, a news ecosystem, a generation’s housing, a hospital chain, a regulatory agency, a Supreme Court, a continent of attention, and be invited to speak about innovation. The poor experience law as gravity. The rich experience law as interior design. For one class, law is the boot, the cuff, the fine, the execution, the garnishment, the warrant, the form, the denial, the hold music, the broken taillight, the impossible deadline, the missed shift, the lost job, the doom spiral. For the other class, law is a room full of clever people moving furniture around until crime becomes theory. They do not break the law. They hire men to teach the law how to bend. They do not flee accountability. They purchase spin to disarm it. They are not citizens in the republic, they are weather systems above it.

Whereas the Founders were still in the corner, by the way, attempting to understand the Supreme Court. “So the robes are priests?” asked Franklin. “Not officially,” said Madison. “But functionally?” asked Jefferson. “Oh, absolutely,” said Adams, who had found a bottle. The Court appeared before them as nine haunted owls in expensive robes, perched upon the highest branch of the dead republic, hooting originalism into a hurricane. They explained that the true meaning of liberty could be found by asking what a powdered gentleman feared in 1789, unless that answer conflicted with the needs of modern capital, in which case the answer could be found in the sacred penumbra of corporate personhood, donor privacy, executive immunity, administrative paralysis, and whatever made billionaires feel safest at night. Washington listened carefully, then asked whether anyone had considered shame. No one had. Shame had been defunded by Reagan in 1981.

Whereas the therapy session collapsed when one America accused the other of hating freedom because it wanted children to survive math class. The hostage video glitched. Uncle Sam’s captors changed the flag behind him because the focus group preferred a slightly deeper blue. The American Dream coded briefly, then returned to life after a pharmaceutical advertisement. The bald eagle was seen flying north with a duffel bag in their talons. Mickey Mouse acquired three regional banks, two childhoods, and the mineral rights beneath EPCOT. The dollar coughed blood into a commemorative envelope. Fireworks continued exploding over the common good, which, though badly damaged, was not entirely dead. This was inconvenient. The common good kept twitching. A librarian gave it water. A nurse checked its pulse. A union steward stood between it and the bulldozer. A teacher read to it. A cook fed it. A janitor cleaned the room around it. A child drew it with crayons as a house, a tree, three people holding hands, and a sun in the corner with too many rays. The drawing was more economically coherent than Congress.

Whereas here is the secret they work hardest to kill: dependence is not failure. Dependence is reality. The infant depends on the mother. The elder depends on the caregiver. The worker depends on the employer. The town depends on the water. The farmer depends on the rain. The city depends on the grid. The hospital depends on the patient. The classroom depends on the student. The stage depends on the actor. The billionaire depends on everyone who does nothing. The lie is not that we are dependent. The lie is that only the vulnerable are dependent. The lie is that needing help is weakness, while hoarding wealth is strength. The lie is that independence means isolation, domination, extraction, and escape. The truth is that no one survives alone except in fantasies written by men who have never washed their own socks.

Therefore, let us declare dependence honestly, with open eyes and empty hands. Let us declare dependence on one another rather than on monsters. Let us declare dependence on air, water, soil, labor, memory, mercy, libraries, public schools, public parks, public health, public shame, public joy, and private kindness. Let us declare dependence on facts, not because facts are always comforting, but because lies are lazy assassins and we have buried enough truths already. Let us declare dependence on art, because capitalism hates imagination that remains unmerchandised. Let us declare dependence on the living world, because the economy is a wholly owned subsidiary of the planet and not the other way around. Let us declare dependence on children not yet born, who have no lobbyists, no PACs, no yacht access, no think tanks, and no defense except our willingness to be less selfish than the machine trains us to be.

Therefore, in the name of the bewildered people of this wounded republic, appealing to the decent judgment of anyone still capable of embarrassment, we do solemnly publish and declare that these United States are, and of right ought to be, dependent upon the health, labor, dignity, education, safety, creativity, memory, courage, and mutual care of the people who actually live here. We reject the false independence of the bunker, the yacht, the gated community, the offshore account, the executive waiver, the private school evacuation plan, the algorithmic rage silo, the purchased judge, the captured agency, the branded childhood, and the glowing Mickey Mouse teat. We reject the maintenance of an elite billionaire class above our laws and norms, above consequence, above shame, above citizenship, above the poisoned water of their own making. We reject the idea that our freedom depends on their freedom from consequences. We declare instead that freedom must mean freedom through us, with us, among us, or it is a dead and buried idea.

And finally, for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on whatever remains of divine Providence, human decency, and the stubborn refusal of the common good to die quietly under fire, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, our sacred Honor, our expired coupons, our broken phones, our library cards, our half-dead gardens, our unpaid invoices, our overdrawn accounts, our bad knees, our anxious hearts, our furious hope, our ridiculous art, our battered republic, and the last clean glass of water we can find.

Amen.

Q