How the culture war turns care into contraband and neighbors into suspects.
A nation shows its soul by what it forbids. In parks and church lots, volunteers are told they need a permit to hand out sandwiches. In some cities there are citations for “sharing food” without authorization. In others, tents are cleared and the belongings of unhoused people are tossed as trash. Grocers fear donations will bring liability even though federal law has long protected them. Meanwhile, families watch good food go to landfills while food banks cut hours because funding fell and rules got tighter. In this climate, an ordinary act like bringing water to a stranger begins to look like defiance.
Walk into a public school and listen. Teachers practice barricading doors. Students memorize which corner of the classroom has the best cover. Parents are told that phones are now banned because they are a distraction and a risk. A fourteen year old in Texas says the quiet part in a sentence that should be carved in the marble of every hearing room: “They are worried about the wrong things. Maybe if they regulate gun violence, we would not be so scared to leave our phones at home.” Lawmakers who refuse to pass basic gun standards pass phone bans and declare victory. The message to a generation is simple. We will police your tools, not the weapons that make you afraid.
At the hospital, nurses look up from charts and meet a different frontline. A patient needs abortion care for a failing pregnancy and the team loses time to lawyers and forms. A pharmacist hesitates to fill a prescription because the medication is also used in reproductive care. A physician tries to correct a dangerous rumor at a town hall while national leaders elevate conspiracy as policy. Evidence based medicine turns into a debate club performance. The harm is measurable. Longer waits. Sicker patients. More fear.
Spend a morning with a mutual aid group in a hot summer. People line up for water and shade. The group knows the drill. Do not block the sidewalk. Keep the trash bags tied. Expect a patrol car and a clipboard. In some jurisdictions the group is told to stop feeding outdoors because there is no permit for compassion. In others the rule appears as a “time, place, manner” restriction that functions like a ban. The press release says order. The street feels like surrender.
How did we get here. The short answer is that a captured state learned to turn empathy into a suspect activity. The long answer is that culture war offers cover for an economic project. Christian Nationalism claims that charity should replace public programs and that government aid weakens moral fiber. White supremacy claims that help goes to the undeserving other. These stories recruit people to support policies that make their own lives harder. If aid is a sin, then cutting it is a virtue. If the neighbor who looks different is the threat, then the closure of the clinic, the rules against tents, and the ban on handing out water look like order instead of neglect.
There is a blunt fact that cuts through the noise. The safety net is broad and multiracial. By raw numbers many beneficiaries are white, especially in rural states. Seniors of every race use Medicare. Families of every race use the child tax credit when it exists and are thrown back into scarcity when it is cut. Workers of every race use unemployment insurance when a plant closes. SNAP helps households with children, seniors, and people with disabilities in every county, including where the loudest speeches are given against it. Yet the stories told on television suggest that help is for someone else. The logic is not arithmetic. It is grievance.
Look at how the criminalization spreads. States pass camping bans and sit-lie laws that turn sleep into a misdemeanor. Cities issue citations for panhandling while wages lag behind rent. Police departments are asked to handle mental health crises because clinics closed and prevention grants were cut. A voter hands a bottle of water to someone who has been in line for hours and learns that in some states that act can bring a fine. An outreach worker drives a pregnant client to a medical appointment and wonders whether a prosecutor will call that transport a crime. In a country crowded with guns and short on clinics, risk falls on the person trying to help.
There is a deep logic that ties these choices together. When care moves from public duty to private virtue, it becomes optional. Once it is optional, it can be restricted by permit, budget, and ideology. We see the results everywhere. School counselors carry caseloads that would crush a seasoned therapist. Food banks become permanent fixtures at churches and libraries. Volunteers do triage on city sidewalks where a nurse and a housing voucher would have solved the problem upstream. A donor summit applauds a pilot program while a legislature blocks guaranteed income that would end the need for pilots. The captured state prefers charity because it is easier to manage. A grant can be denied. A vote is harder to erase.
White supremacy and Christian Nationalism do not just live in slogans. They live in statutes. A bounty style law invites private citizens to sue over reproductive care. A curriculum law threatens teachers who discuss the fullness of American history. A “public order” bill makes it a crime to sleep in a public place while housing waitlists stretch for years. A drag performance ban chills community events that raise money for food and rent. None of these measures feed a child or keep a neighborhood safe. They do tell a base that its identity is being defended. That is the point. Stir the anger. Shrink the circle of who counts as the public. Then move the budget without much noise.
Follow a single day to see how this feels in a town. A volunteer posts a request for bottled water and shade tents because heat advisories are back. A school holds another lockdown drill. A clinic closes early because they are short staffed again. A small grocery turns away a pallet of past date bread because the manager worries about rules, even though federal Good Samaritan protections exist. A church pantry runs out of milk by noon. A park ranger clears a cluster of tents before dusk. A city council meeting features a heated speech about the dangers of books and a unanimous vote to cut a small grant that kept a mobile health van on the road. None of these scenes are special. Together they describe a country that calls kindness a disruption.
People ask whether these rules are even legal. Many are. That is why they persist. The most effective form of control is not martial. It is administrative. It is a set of small choices that make the humane thing slightly harder and the punitive thing slightly easier. Require permits. Shorten hours. Narrow definitions. Move oversight from the public body that listens to the one that does not. Schedule hearings when working people cannot attend. Cut eligibility at the margins and call it stewardship. The intent hides in the calendar, the form, and the budget line.
Aid to migrants is an especially clear target. A volunteer group leaves water in the desert and faces citations. A church hosts a clinic and receives threats. A neighbor offers a ride to an appointment and wonders whether a prosecutor will call it transport with intent. The public is told that enforcement is the only language a nation understands. The cheaper language, which is safety, housing, and lawful pathways, is dismissed as weakness. Meanwhile, the same economy that urges crackdowns depends on immigrant labor to pick crops, clean hospitals, and build homes. The contradiction is not a mistake. It is a strategy that keeps wages low and workers quiet.
The criminalization of women’s health care turns the same screws. Motherhood is praised in ads. In law, it becomes a terrain of surveillance. If abortion care is treated as murder, then helping a friend pay for travel can be treated as conspiracy. If a pharmacist can deny medication because it might be used for reproductive care, then a patient with a stomach ulcer goes untreated. If an embryo is a legal person, then common steps in fertility care become a minefield. Women who can travel will travel. Women who cannot will risk health and life. The people who wrote these laws will call the suffering a test of virtue. The hospitals that absorb the damage will call it uncompensated care.
School is the place where all of this becomes concrete. A classroom becomes a bunker because lawmakers chose guns over counselors and locks over laws. A library becomes a battlefield because a group demands the removal of books that describe certain families. A teacher becomes a suspect because a lesson covers history that is real and painful. A kid hears adults argue about his phone while friends whisper about which exits are fastest if a man enters the hallway with a rifle. The lesson delivered is not civic. It is primal. Trust less. Hide more. The cost of this lesson is not counted in any budget.
We should speak plainly about the racial arithmetic behind the politics. When people are told that programs mostly help someone else, they will accept cuts that hurt them too. This is the “let it burn” instinct dressed as principle. End the program because it might help a neighbor who does not look like you. Reject the clinic because a different family might receive care first. Vote for the cut and call it responsibility. A year later the bridge is still posted for low weight. The pharmacy still has a line. The school still holds lockdown drills. The promise of punishment delivered nothing but a smaller life.
There is an old law that deserves daylight. Since the 1990s the federal government has protected good faith food donations from civil and criminal liability. Many states enhance that shield. Yet much edible food is still wasted because the rules are misunderstood or because local ordinances treat public sharing like littering. This is fixable. Cities can write clear guidance and streamline permits so churches and community groups do not become paper mills. Counties can fund cold storage and transport so donations do not die in the heat. Legislatures can write a simple sentence that says a police officer’s time is better spent than ticketing a table of sandwiches. These are not radical steps. They are administrative choices that announce what side a place is on.
There are other places where clarity will help. If a state wants to ban giving water to voters in line, it should at least own the message. If a city wants to criminalize sleeping outdoors, it should at least show the number of beds it funds on any given night. If a legislature wants to make abortion care impossible to access, it should at least fund maternal and neonatal units that are closing because reimbursements do not cover costs. If leaders want to keep tight control on food assistance, they should at least calculate the overdraft fees and evictions that follow when paperwork mistakes interrupt benefits. Once these numbers are public, voters can ask whether the cruelty is doing what it promised.
The economy of aid is not mystical. It is a series of local invoices. Ticket someone for feeding people and you will pay the same day in police overtime and the next month in emergency room bills. Close a shelter and you will pay for more jail nights and ambulance rides. Starve a school of counselors and you will pay in classroom disruptions, resignations, and long term costs that show up as unemployment and incarceration. This is not softness. It is math. The cheapest, fastest way to reduce visible suffering is to reduce actual suffering. Every other route is theater.
If you want a measure that crosses party lines, try this. Call it the Care Test. Ask whether a policy makes it simpler to help a person without a lawyer, a lobbyist, or a permit. If the answer is no, you are looking at punishment dressed as order. Ask whether a policy strengthens the organizations that help the most people with the fewest questions. If the answer is no, you are looking at a preference for control over outcomes. Good policy leaves kindness alone and funds competence.
Breaking the spell of cult politics requires more than facts. It requires a different story about who we are to each other. The current story says there is not enough for all. It says help for your neighbor steals from you. It says government cannot work, so let it fail and then sell the pieces. A better story is older and truer. We built a country where a teacher does not need a flak jacket, where a nurse can practice science without apology, where a volunteer can hand water to a person in line without consulting a statute. We can do that again. The steps are public and practical.
Here are a few that any reader can check and support. Enforce the federal protections for food donation and fund local logistics so edible food moves quickly. Repeal or narrow ordinances that ticket aid and criminalize sleep when there is no shelter bed available. Pass extreme heat protections that include water stations and shade for outdoor workers and volunteers. Restore the child tax credit at the level that actually reduced child poverty. Expand Medicaid in states that still refuse it and fund maternal care in counties where labor and delivery units closed. Require safe storage, background checks, and waiting periods for firearms, and let cities set stronger rules when they choose. Repeal laws that ban water for voters and replace them with rules that shorten lines. Protect reproductive care and the providers who deliver it so medicine is medicine again.
These steps do not require a single person to change faith or abandon identity. They require leaders to decide that care is not contraband. They require a public willing to see that the target always widens. Start with migrants, move to the unhoused, reach for the pregnant, and then for the teacher, the nurse, the volunteer, and the voter who stayed too long in the heat. That is how culture war works. It narrows the circle of belonging until a person discovers they are outside of it. The fix is to widen the circle on purpose.
A country that criminalizes aid is a country that forgets what aid prevents. Hunger becomes theft. Sickness becomes a storm. Loneliness becomes a ticket to nowhere. None of this is inevitable. All of it is chosen. The same government that can ticket a woman for giving a sandwich can choose to fund the shelter that would render the ticket nonsense. The same legislature that can ban water in line can choose to fund more polling places. The same governor who can praise prayer can choose to sign a budget that keeps clinics open and schools safe.
Let the record for this part be simple. In this period, the state treats empathy as a problem to be managed. It polices kindness, narrows rights, and calls the pain it creates a moral victory. Christian Nationalism and white supremacy supply the script and the heat. The safety net is cut in the name of virtue, even when the cut harms the people cheering it on. The winner is not faith or order. The winner is the network that profits when help disappears.
We can choose a better rule. Help should never need a permit. Hunger should never be evidence of crime. Truth should not have to argue with a slogan. A child should not practice hiding from gunfire while adults debate phones. A nurse should not triage rumors while a leader performs a press conference. A neighbor handing water to a neighbor should look like what it is. The beginning of a country worth the name.