You can’t farm your way out of depression
On RFK Jr.’s so-called “wellness farms”
It is Spring and it will never be freezing again.
I was watching a video of Donald Trump saying the golden age of America has begun and a video of Elissa Slotkin hearkening back to the good old days of Ronald Reagan when I got a call from my accountant. I asked if I even needed to pay my taxes this year and he laughed a little and said well we will see. He was kidding I think. He takes me paying my taxes very seriously. He told me he knew people at the IRS and they were all being fired. The people who go after the big tax cheats were all working on smaller stuff now and the workload was going to be so overwhelming that they’d never have time to get around to looking into the millionaires. It’s pretty transparent what they’re doing he said and I said yes it is. It is as plain as day. About twenty minutes in he told me he was rushing to get as many of his clients’ taxes done as early as he could because he had to go to London soon for some tests. Is everything alright I said and he said no actually he probably wasn’t going to be around much longer. He had cancer he said and I said oh. Oh no. Jesus. I’m so sorry etc. The stupid sounds you make when someone tells you that kind of thing. He never would have even known if he hadn’t developed some serious back pain he said and then one thing led to another and now he will live between one or a few years more. He said he was going back home to see a specialist because in the UK it is free unlike here. And then he asked me how many miles I had put on my car this year and how many of those were for business. He asked me if I had purchased any new equipment for my home office. He usually asks me how my writing business has gone over the past year but this time he didn’t and that is understandable. He used to always seem impressed that I wrote for The Guardian. He said your wife is still a teacher right and I said yes. And then he told me how many tens of thousands of dollars I would have to send to the federal government. It’s not going to be so bad he said. Meaning both things. He said he was taking it pretty well all things considered. He wasn’t restless at night. He is 63 he told me when I asked. I’m not a young man like you he said and I had to think about that one for a while. He told me to put some money into the pathetic little IRA fund he made me set up a few years ago. So that I would have something to live on down the line. Donald Trump said he and Elon Musk were rooting out fraud all across the federal government and that he was going to get tax cuts passed for all of us. For every American. My accountant asked me to send him his fee as soon as possible and I said that I would. And then I wrote a check to the government. So I would be square with what I owe them.
The Trump administration has announced it plans to cut 80,000 jobs from the Department of Veterans Affairs. Among other things the agency provides healthcare to millions of veterans. “This administration is finally going to give the veterans what they want,” Veterans Affairs Secretary Doug Collins said.
Maybe!
Meanwhile workers everywhere else are losing their jobs.
Was July 2020 a good time or not I forget.
You ever have the thought that these marauders are going to end up harming so many desperate people in so many different ways in this country awash with guns that some of them will eventually be pushed to a violent backlash?
I think that's probably true but it won't be any of the big guys getting shot. People usually just shoot whoever is nearby. Even a bullet can only travel so far.
I'm not shooting anyone to be clear. There's a case for people on the left availing themselves of their second amendment rights afforded to them under the Constitution (for now) but I listen to too much Songs:Ohia and drink too much scotch to trust myself with a gun.
Kim Kelly and I talked about this a few years back.
Luke O’Neil
I know I've shared this one a bunch of times but with all the renewed attention on Anora after its many Oscar wins you might be ready to read this great piece on it by Rax King from a few months ago.
Luke O’Neil
Anna Hamilton returns today to write about RFK Jr.'s foolish and insidious plan to send people living with mental and behavioral health issues to labor camps. Previously they wrote for Hell World about the music of Gillian Welch.
Luke O’Neil
You'll have to be a paid subscriber to read it in full. More from me after that as well including the metaphor of the week, the song of the week, the best thing I read today, and Luke's Movie Corner.
Here's a very generous discount that I will leave up for a day or so.
I don't take them because they're fun
by Anna Hamilton
Conspiracy-supporting antivaxxer, falconry devotee, dead animal enthusiast, and Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has a radical idea to treat people on antidepressants, neurodiverse people on ADHD medications, and people with substance use disorders: send them to wellness farms. Yes, wellness farms. Or as they’re otherwise known labor camps.
Kennedy described his idea during a Latino Town Hall event in 2024. “I’m going to create these wellness farms where they can go to get off of illegal drugs, off of opiates, but also illegal drugs, other psychiatric drugs, if they want to, to get off of SSRIs, to get off of benzos, to get off of Adderall, and to spend as much time as they need—three or four years if they need it—to learn to get reparented, to reconnect with communities…”
Now, the idea of a farming paradise where people who are off of their meds go to labor for the benefit of the wealthy might just be a rambling “disruptive” innovation from a guy who has too much money and not enough sense to be qualified for anything, including the job he currently holds. But as a person who is on some of the medications he has demonized as harmful, I think it’s worth taking a look at why “wellness farms” are such a spectacularly bad idea.
How would one motivate people with serious mental health issues to farm, particularly if they do not have access to a tool—medication—that keeps them safe from their own brain? Does anyone really think that a bunch of depressed people will enthusiastically take up watering cans and trowels to plant rows of vegetables at amazing speeds?
Will people with ADD or ADHD have their executive functioning issues, time blindness, and other symptoms managed by hoeing rows of vegetables? What’s the plan for people with a substance use disorder who might need maintenance doses of a drug in order to avoid painful withdrawal symptoms? What happens if someone who is tapering down from a regular dose of anti-anxiety medication has a medical emergency like a seizure? Who will be monitoring the camps’ residents – professionals like doctors, nurse practitioners, and substance use disorder specialists – or will it be people whose only qualification is that they have a freezer full of roadkill meat?