America’s Care Crisis is Manufactured. We Can Fix It.
written by Don Abram, Founder and CEO
Mitigating the crisis means changing how we care.
We are living through a care crisis of epic proportions. Families are poorer. Kids are hungrier. Clinics are closing. Safety nets are shrinking. Care is harder to reach and easier to lose these days. What’s more alarming is how quickly we got here, rationing care as if it were a privilege instead of a right.
And the truth is, no one person is responsible. Despite our instinicts, we cannot pass the buck or cast blame to our nearest political, theological, or ideological foe. We have all made daily choices about who receives care, who is denied it, and who must beg for it. These choices often have been embedded in power disparities designed around one’s perceived race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, or immigration status to name a few. The most well meaning among us have fallen prey to social conditioning which teaches that some communities are more worthy than others. These seemingly individualistic choices have accumulated into the crisis that we are now trying to survive.
It would be disingenuous of me to suggest that this man-made crisis is evenly distributed. While it touches and implicates us all, it bears down hardest on the most vulnerable among us—Black and Brown folks, queer and trans folks, poor folks. For these communities, the crisis is not news, it is a chronic and pervasive reality. Their lived experiences testify to a truth we are now all confronted with: care is and always has been a contested space. One where access to basic care and concern—extending a deadline, getting an appointment, taking pain seriously, offering help without being asked— was mediated through one’s proximity to power and privilege.
We see this playing out on the national stage with higher stakes and deadlier consequences. It is no coincidence that the programs being cut and funding being slashed are directed at those on the underside of power. Trans people are denied healthcare and forced to discontinue life-saving and life-affirming care. Immigrants are hunted, caged, and disappeared as immigration enforcement casts their survival as criminal. The HIV epidemic continues to ravage communities while prevention is defunded and care is delayed, leaving thousands with unmet needs.
Care being contested means the humanity of the other becomes negotiable or even conditional. This manufactured crisis trains us to believe an insidious lie: that care is scarce, and that those who need it must fight for scraps. We watch these struggles play out on our televisions and our phones, learning to ignore the pleas of others because we have managed to secure our own daily ration of care. We sit back and measure a community’s worthiness and adjust our response based on what we think it will cost us, failing to recognize that not caring will cost the collective more. Instead of seeing one another in our full humanity, our minds become trained to calculate worthiness and deservingness according to exclusive and unrealistic standards.
To reclaim the beloved community that has been stolen from us by the lie of care scarcity, we must counter it with a radical truth: care can be given in abundance. This is the interpersonal and communal work of solidarity which analyses power to seek repair where care has been deprived. Solidarity recognizes that care is rooted in witnessing the struggle of another as though it is your own because their struggle, if left unaddressed, will come to visit you. Solidarity rightly calculates care as the single greatest investment we can make in our human collective.
The shift from scarcity to solidarity is not always an easy one. Our minds may be conditioned to conflate withholding care as safety. The emotional fortitude required to take up what feels like others’ burdens is not so freely exercised. Solidarity or compassion are disciplines that we must ritualize into collective practice for the best chance of a widespread cultural shift. For best results, our prioritization of care must be consistent across a variety of sectors. We can ritualize care in our religious lives, in personal ethos, and even in political realms.
Many of us are familiar with charity and even mutual aid models where we care directly for those in need on an interpersonal or institutional basis. This is an immediate first step for many, but we know that this alone cannot disappear structures of neglect and systematized violence. Along with those investments, we can also pay attention to the ways care is provided in public - in education, healthcare, nonprofits, and faith communities. We must first be able to believe those impacted when they experience gaps in care. Then, we must join with them to advocate for structural change within the institutions responsible for serving all of us. Should this fail, we turn to the political arena to prevent the worst of harm.
For political intervention to be effective, we must insist upon a culture of prioritized investment in care. We must recognize investing in care as a communal necessity not only to benefit communities other than ours, but to directly impact our own lives, too. Funding for education, healthcare, food, children, and housing need not be controversial as we recognize that these basic needs met are the bedrock of safe and joyous communities for everyone. This is a reassertion of our belief in humanity. This is care reimagined.
