Being Sober is Harder than Being Rich and Being Gay is Braver than Being a Cop E.E. Tinguely Follow Feb 23 · 10 min read

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In this post-truth age of ours, where perception and narrative supersede fact and statistics, it’s easy to fall into the muddy waters of our Western discourse around wealth and drown in the swirling pools of propaganda. You don’t need to look far — just look in the business and lifestyle section of your local rag for British millionaires and you’ll find some section pontificating on the downsides of being rich or the worst parts of wealth, or some numbnut billionaire talking about the lessons they learned and their tips for navigating the difficult road of “having shit tons of money”.

This is a literal Ponzi scheme, where people who are already rich charge you real money for fake advice. They’re just making money off of the fact that they already have money — once you’ve accrued enough, people will pay you just to pay you. Write some crap book where you claim you’ll give people the same advice which brought you your success, and people will shove money at you hand-over-fist. There’s an entire industry built around the presupposition of wealth, founded upon the (frankly accurate) idea that it’s easier to make money if it looks like you already have it.

This isn’t entirely irrational, it’s simply an appeal to inductive reasoning. These people have clearly made money before, so won’t they continue to make money? There was some reason they made it already, doesn’t that same reason apply?

Except, it’s all bullshit. These people never made money, they took it or had it given to them. Nobody in the history of the World has ever earned a billion dollars. Not one person. They were born with it, or achieved it through sheer circumstance or greed. Never once has hard work or personal struggle led directly to such disproportionate wealth. They’re born with the money, then write a crap book selling the idea that they earned it and promising to help others earn it. It’s like a scheme-y, Wolf of Wall Street version of the cave allegory. The enlightened few are returning to the dark depths of normality to show us feeble, dirty poors that YOU CAN BE RICH LIKE ME IN 10 EASY STEPS!

I’m tired of entertaining this idea that there’s some value worth considering in the mere possession of wealth. That someone is worth listening to simply because they’re rich. The idea that someone’s opinions are automatically valid, interesting, and important because they won a birth lottery. The flip side, of course, being that the opinions of the poor and marginalized are by default boorish and not worth engaging with.

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You know what’s hard? Sobriety. It’s hard looking at this shattered landscape we used to call a functional planet without wanting to escape. It’s hard knowing there’s a button you can press that will solve half your problems, but you’re not allowed to press it. It’s hard self-medicating when the entire medical industry is built around sickening you. It’s hard getting shoved out of a manufacturing field due to automation, and the only work left is catering to the tastes of the gentrifier class (and boy, do they like having entire neighborhoods of craft breweries).

It’s hard managing chronic pain when you’ve already overcome opiate addiction. Maybe even impossible, except in fringe cases. It’s hard watching your friends drop like flies because they were part of a machine that didn’t give a shit about them. It’s forbiddingly difficult to find meaning in those deaths, that would’ve been so incredibly easy to prevent.

Sobriety takes years. It takes vigilance, self-dedication, a desire to improve, and a robust set of social structures which can provide the foundation you need. Sobriety is a process of reflection and re-education, where you teach yourself what you used to enjoy and what you want to enjoy in the future. It’s finding ways to reach out to old friends, and seeing only salt and ash behind you. Being rich is none of those things. It’s easy. It’s the cure to the illness so many suffer from.

If your problem can be solved with money, you don’t actually have a problem. If you’re sick, and there’s a medicine that can save you except for the fact that it costs too much, your illness is no longer the problem. If you have cancer and die because the chemo was too expensive, you didn’t die from cancer. You were murdered by a system that could’ve saved you, but chose not to. These are murders by omission, and their blood soaks the hands of the capitalist class. Addiction is their MO.

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Gender and sexual minorities are often the most immediate victims of this systematic, top-down violence. These murders by omission don’t only take the form of direct, virulent illness or intense drug addiction. Sometimes they take the form of social ills. In our broken Western society, minorities have — like most all of us — been given their lot in life early on. They are relegated to the underclass, and the interpersonal, physical violence that this system manifests is targeted against them. We’ve built a bureaucracy of social queues weaponized against the “other”, and its sights are trained directly on those whose mere existence stands contrary to the fundamentalist, exclusionary values that wealth is predicated upon.

Being gay is an act of bravery, one that is beginning to earn some recognition for such. It is a defiant stand, in front of the infernal engines that thresh skin from bone, and a booming declaration that their self-actualization and comfort is more valuable than the interests of a thousand billionaires. It is an immensely powerful statement, to mandate oneself as equally worthy of love and affection as anyone else regardless of one’s circumstance of birth. This act advocates not only for oneself but for everyone else who might’ve been given similar circumstances. It advocates for every gender minority, sexual minority, ethnic minority, religious minority, and beyond. It cuts to the core of how circumstance and birth connect to justice and equality. Nobody should be given advantage or disadvantage in living life just because they were born a certain way.

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Being a cop is different. It’s a suit you put on, a costume, a mask. It is a voluntary act, made freely without coercion. Nobody was ever tied down and forced to become a policeman, they chose to. They wanted to. These people were offered the choice to make money by carrying a gun around and treating themselves as more important than others — they were given the choice to become class traitors, and took it. These kapo scum drank the reactionary, billionaire Kool-Aid and began their work as the functionaries of private property.

Police kill around one thousand people in a given year in the US, a 9/11 every three years visited upon the inner city and working poor. This is a voluntary act.

Being a cop is not dangerous, don’t let them fool you. Despite all their flowery talk of leaving home in the morning not knowing whether they’ll make it back home, being a cop isn’t even in the top 10 most dangerous jobs. Being a roofer is more dangerous. Working in any sort of resource extraction — mining, well operations, logging — is monumentally more dangerous than being a cop. From the pure stats of it, being a cop is about as dangerous as being a mechanic supervisor. Your uncle who works in a machine shop, though? Does he talk every day about how he doesn’t know if he’s gonna make it home, and expect a blue ribbon every time he farts?

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If a roofer talked the same way that police do, demanding that they get kisses and get told they’re handsome or else they’ll walk off the job, we’d collectively diagnose them as “an asshole” and encourage them to politely fuck off. Roofers don’t do that, though, because roofers are normal functional people. Not those in authority, not police. They’re not normal, they’re not functional. They tend towards authoritarian personality disorders, which explains why they seemingly jump at the opportunity to gun black men down. They are given a lens through which to view the world in their own terms, and they’re given the tools to actualize that world. They view the world as one full of black criminals, and thus make every black person into a criminal. They were the world as one full of homosexual deviants, and thus both enforce and punish homosexual deviancy.

They push them out of their homes as their own gay children, they push them out of public spaces as trespassers, they push them out of social services and workplaces as mentally ill or “risks”, they push them out of everywhere other than underground safe spaces and prisons. They push them into homelessness and submission.

Police beat their domestic partners at four times the national average, meaning about 40% of police families have experienced domestic violence. This is a voluntary act.

There’s no substantial evidence that increasing the number of police decreases the rate of crime, because the role police serve has never been and never will be the prevention of crime — it has been, and will always be, the punishment of crime. Crime, of course, is usually defined as some crime against property rather than another person — if that weren’t the case, then murders and rapes would be solved much more easily. Rather than that, crimes are often whatever act is committed by the working class against the property owning class: selling drugs and neglecting to pay taxes (because, let’s be real, that’s the actual issue), trespassing, vandalism, public nuisance statutes… The real crimes here are simply being poor and daring to exist loudly rather than curl up and quietly die like a good worker.

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This is not bravery, this is cowardice. This is subservience to the Bezos’ of the world, the Trumps, the Bloombergs. This is picking at the scraps of wealth by stomping on the heads and backs of those below you. This is sheer, unadulterated greed and self-interest, masquerading as performing the social good of “stopping the bad guys”. Again: there is absolutely zero evidence that cops actually stop bad guys. There are two hundred thousand rape kits going untested in police storage. These people don’t only not give a shit, they actively prevent meaningful progress in terms of crime prevention by centralizing every possible resource under one dick-useless umbrella.

Policing as an institution began as runaway slave patrols, and their modern role in the contemporary slave trade of incarceration is identical. This is a voluntary act.

I implore my fellow beneficiaries of global colonialism and capitalism to stop buying these scams. Stop believing the lies of billionaires. Stop caping for their interests like pathetic, unthinking homunculi. We are capable of so much more than this existence as productive dopamine robots that we’ve been relegated to. The institutions of wealth and policing only have as much legitimacy and power as we give them.

Let’s take that power away. Disarm the police, arm the gender and sexual minorities. Enough of leveraging the law against property crimes, and nothing else. If the empty houses of the wealthy are stormed by the disenfranchised, the marginalized, the oppressed, what crime has truly happened? Only a crime on paper, only a crime de jure. A look from outside the box would show that, at face value, a crime against property is not a crime at all. A crime against wealth, a crime against a thing but not a person, is not a crime.

How soon would we have a world worth defending if the empty holdings of the landed gentry were no longer protected? How soon would radical wealth redistribution be achieved if the wealth of the working class no longer subsidized the wealth of the wealthy? It’s our money that pays those police, not theirs. The billionaire class doesn’t pay taxes, that’s for peasants. The owner class is elevated to that status by receiving taxation, not giving it away, and it’s with those resources that they line the pockets of their military, their front line soldiers, their vanguard, the police. The very existence of policing as an institution shifts wealth upwards.

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This is all in service of the first point made in this essay, before the body. Being sober is harder than being rich, and being gay is braver than being a cop. It’s obviously a salacious headline, one meant to stir and cause a reaction. That makes it no less legitimate, however. Policing is, broadly, a very safe activity whose only real danger lies in being on the receiving end. Being gay is profoundly dangerous. There’s a bevy of health issues that our medical industry has no interest in addressing, and there’s a swathe of social ills that sexual and gender minorities expose themselves to. Being sober is profoundly difficult — addiction is universally self-medication, and depriving oneself of medication in a society ill-equipped to provide it elsewhere is no easy task. Being a billionaire, however, is as easy as waking up. Your money collects more money. There is absolutely zero effort put into this — you pay people with your money to make you more money. Paying someone isn’t work, you’re paying them to do work.

Let’s drop the bullshit, and live a life based on reality rather than the nocturnal emissions of Eric Trump.