"You only give me your funny papers"

 

The man in his 60s had been talking to people at the United gate; he was clearly a man who liked to converse. We sat next to each other in row 28. A vet, he'd been a nuclear weapons specialist when he was young. Wrecked his teeth. He wears a grill when he travels to explain insurance benefits to people: on this trip alone, he'd been to Idaho, Chicago, Indiana (he was wearing an IU jersey), and Connecticut. A lot of it he drove. We were flying from Hartford to DC, and then he'd fly home to Texas. He can't sleep after a long trip like this one, though he sleeps a lot on the road. He'd witnessed an ICE raid at Midway airport, or he'd more than witnessed it; a man "in uniform" demanded his papers, which he refused to give, telling the guy he wasn't a cop, had no authority, and to f-king leave him alone. "They're going after the black and the brown," he said. "You know why they pardoned all those J6 rioters." Runs into racism all the time. "I'm in charge here," he told one office manager; "do you want to know about your benefits or not?" That guy backed off.

 

He pulled out his phone's calculator app and started multiplying numbers. What the government takes from everyone who works (400 million of us), what they take over 30 years of our work lives, how it adds up to four quadrillion dollars. "Do you even know what that symbol means?" he asked, to which I shook my head no. "Where does all that money go?" As we approached Dulles, huge mansions came into view, not McMansions but MaxMansions, and he noted that some of the money had gone there. Started rapidly inserting his left index finger into the circle made by his right fingers. "That's what they're doing to us, all of them. All the old politicians have to go." When he'd posted his equation on FB, he was called into the boss's office, and some feds came looking for him where he lives.

 

His congresswoman is Jasmine Crockett and he's not telling her to go. As he walked off the plane, his bad hip was clearly hurting him; he was heading home by way of other conversations, no doubt. 

 

[Lilith was with me in spirit, though she'd never have fit under the seat]