The Big Beautiful Bill is drained-pool politics. It doesn’t build. It empties. It takes what was fragile to begin with—programs like SNAP, housing vouchers, and Medicaid—and guts them with the cold precision of a budget line. It reaches into the deepest corners of our fears and whispers, “You are about to lose everything.” And for some, that loss has already come. Then it turns and says to others, who have stuff, “They are coming to take what’s yours.” That hollow panic isn’t new. It’s the background noise of American life and the fuel of racism, xenophobia, and hate. This bill is both policy and pedagogy. It teaches us, over and over, who is seen as worthy, and who is not. Zero-sum thinking in action.
To live in America is to live at the border of belonging and exile. To be told you are free, and yet watched, priced, punished, and policed. W.E.B. Du Bois called it double consciousness—the sense of Black Americans (and now other marginalized groups) looking at themselves through their own eyes and those of a nation steeped in white supremacy. bell hooks taught us about homeplace—that radical act of carving dignity and safety out of a world that tried to strip it away. Gloria Anzaldúa gave it shape in Borderlands/La Frontera—that shifting terrain where languages mix, identities blur, and the body becomes both a wound and a bridge. The Big Beautiful Bill is just the latest reminder of this dissonance.
It’s like that moment at the family cookout—when you’re losing the game, and in a flash of blinking frustration, you “accidentally” knock over the table so no one wins. That’s what this bill does. But this ain’t no game. And we ain’t at no barbecue. This is policy as sabotage. A government flipping the board because the people most likely to win this round were never meant to play in the first place.
The pool is not drained because it must be. It is drained because some would rather see it empty than see it shared, the same way segregated cities in the Jim Crow South chose to close public pools rather than desegregate them. And when the water is gone, when the laughter and relief have dried up, what remains is silence. We are left staring at the cracked tile, with weeds growing in the jagged edges. Like the lonely, empty places of horror films, we wonder how it came to this; though somewhere deep inside, we already know.
We have walked a long road to get here. We did not always walk it side by side. But we walked. Through the smoke of revolution and the blood spilled in civil war. Through the fragile promise of Reconstruction and the devastation that followed. Through the long shadow of Jim Crow and the footfalls of those who marched across Selma’s bridge. Through Seneca Falls and the Stonewall Uprising. Through the barbed wire of internment camps and the terror of raids in the dead of night. Through the cotton fields of the South and the factory floors of the North. Through redlines on maps and breadlines in winter. Through every picket sign held high in trembling hands.
This country has never given justice freely. Every step forward has been a demand. Every inch of progress has been contested. And yet, still, we walk. Here we are, staring down the nation’s 250th anniversary. A quarter millennium of this American experiment. A country born in rebellion, baptized in contradiction, and raised on the labor of people it tried to forget.
During the Bicentennial in 1976, we papered over the wounds. We wrapped ourselves in flags and fireworks while cities burned and poverty rose. We sang of freedom, even as we gutted the very programs meant to deliver it. We celebrated liberty while leaving the cupboard bare.
And now? Now we return to that same empty cupboard, only this time we've stripped it down ourselves. The Big Beautiful Bill is about erasure—reaching in and taking from the most vulnerable, flipping the table rather than playing fair. It’s draining the pool again and refusing to share, even if it means no one swims for generations. So what does it mean to mark 250 years of America?
It means reckoning. Not just with the past, but with the lies we still tell. It means asking whether we will use this moment to deepen our democracy or to bury it beneath the weight of selective memory. This time, we must do more than perform patriotism. We must build it. Every single “250” activity in Massachusetts, Boston, and beyond must support democracy for the future! We must protect it. It is time to stop playing games and start acting on justice. Not in abstract speeches but in housing, health care, education, and art. Not in myths, but in meals. Not in slogans, but in systems that work. This is democracy!
We’ve walked a long road. But the next stretch demands more of us. We can either continue draining the pool or we can refill it, repair it, and invite everyone in. Because if 250 years have taught us anything, it's that the American story is not done. And what happens next is up to us.