In the Wake of the Big Beautiful Bill

On being dealt a devastating blow by Trump, but not being beaten.

Speaker of the House Mike Johnson is congratulated by his fellow Republicans after signing the One Big Beautiful Bill Act during an enrollment ceremony in the Rayburn Room at the U.S. Capitol on Thursday.

I don’t know who’s meant to stand at the top of the mountain and sound the horn. Maybe Moses, maybe the ghost of someone such as Fred Hampton. I’m truly unsure. But I do know I have a platform, and with that comes the need for truth-telling. So let me be clear: we are in a moment of profound devastation, the kind that settles in your bones and dares you to look away.

The House has passed what they’ve dubbed the “Big Beautiful Bill,” a name as slick and deceptive as the policies buried within it. Backed by Donald Trump and his allies, the bill slashes billions in funding from essential programs. Targeting Medicaid, housing assistance, and food aid. It threatens over 17 million disabled Americans who rely on federal support, and guts protections laid out in the Americans with Disabilities Act. It is, in no uncertain terms, legislative violence—a coordinated attempt to disappear the poor, the disabled, the marginalized.

And while it doesn’t carry a weapon, it still kills slowly, bureaucratically, efficiently. This bill is big in its cruelty and “beautiful” only in the eyes of those who benefit from others’ suffering.

This bill is an act of war. Not with guns, but with policy. Not with bombs, but with budgets.

This is a moment—regardless of who you are—that we all need to be ringing the bell. Warning. Waking. Fighting.

This country keeps trying to legislate people like us out of existence. First, it enslaved us. Then it caged us. Now it starves us, evicts us, erases us with pens instead of whips.

We have been here before.

This bill, presented with pomp and audacity by the same man who promised a wall he called beautiful, is no different. It offers nothing but a reiteration of this nation’s original sin. Indifference and contempt for human life, especially when that life resides in bodies society has chosen to marginalize. Disabled bodies, Black bodies, poor bodies, queer bodies, immigrant bodies. Bodies America never wanted to recognize fully as human. Bodies America has long tried to erase, legislate away, or quietly destroy.

History teaches us hard truths. The American experiment, for all its lofty rhetoric about freedom, equality, and justice, has always depended on the exploitation and neglect of those seen as “other.” Our schools teach us of victories and revolutions, but gloss over the intimate brutality that made the engine of America run. We learn briefly of slavery and Jim Crow, of internment camps and forced sterilizations, of Indigenous genocide and homophobia, but we seldom confront them fully enough to understand their echoes today.

These echoes are what we hear in this new bill—its pages inked with cruelty masquerading as fiscal prudence, efficiency, patriotism. Yet behind its economic jargon and coded language lies a simple, devastating truth: it seeks to abandon those most in need. It aims to gut social programs, strip away protections painstakingly won through decades of struggle, and return us to an America where only the wealthy and powerful thrive, while everyone else fights to survive.

We have seen this before, yes. But we have also survived this before. And more importantly—we have won before.

This nation’s marginalized communities have long understood something fundamental: survival is collective. It has always been collective. When my ancestors stood on auction blocks, when they sang in fields, when they prayed in hush arbors hidden deep in forests, when they marched against fire hoses and snarling dogs, they prevailed because they stood together. And standing together, they transformed survival into resistance, and resistance into hope.

It is tempting to look at this bill and fall into despair, to surrender ourselves to cynicism and resignation. It would be easy to believe that all our marches, protests, essays, and votes have been for nothing. But that is exactly what they want. Despair is an oppressor’s greatest weapon, the sharpest tool in the arsenal of cruelty. It convinces us to disarm ourselves, to become our own jailers.

We cannot afford that luxury.

We must instead remember the courage of those who came before us. People who fought battles they knew they might not win, but fought anyway, because the fight itself was sacred. They taught us that hope is not naive optimism, not blind faith that things will simply get better because time passes. Hope, rather, is a fierce and stubborn discipline. Hope is waking up every morning and choosing to believe that your actions matter, that justice is possible, and that the future can be changed by the hands of people determined enough to change it.

And change it we must.

Community is our greatest weapon. The American mythology praises the rugged individual, the self-made man, the solitary hero. But the truth is that we have always needed each other. Our greatest moments, our greatest victories, were born not from solitary heroes but from collective struggle. From the singing crowds on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, from coalitions forged in sweat and blood and love, from movements sparked in living rooms and church basements and street corners.

We need to relearn that lesson now. To organize like never before, to create spaces of safety and healing, to feed each other not just with bread but with knowledge, kindness, and strength. To tell stories that remind us of our worth, our dignity, our shared humanity. To confront the cruelty not only with protests but with mutual aid, solidarity, and fierce advocacy for those who cannot speak for themselves.

In dark times, hope resides in the everyday acts of resistance. In every moment we refuse silence, refuse despair, refuse defeat. Every time we show up for each other, every time we defy injustice, every time we speak truth even when our voices tremble, we chip away at the very foundations of cruelty. And we build something beautiful in its place: a future where dignity is non-negotiable, and justice is not a distant dream but a present reality.

And so, yes, this “Big Beautiful Bill” is a horror—but it is also a test. A test of who we are willing to become, of what we are willing to risk, of how deeply we are willing to love. It is a test of whether we understand that freedom for some is freedom for none, and that none of us are free until all of us are free.

We will pass this test together.

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