When Hate Becomes Policy
Poetry & Prose by Britt Wolfe
They practise the grammar of cruelty—
short sentences, louder cameras, a smile calibrated
to the light on a stage.
Words are spat like receipts:
numbers for narratives, charts for excuses,
a ledger that counts profit over people.
They can’t fix a hospital or a school,
but they can sell the roof and teach you to clap.
They’ll privatize a bed and call it choice,
carve the commons into parcels, hand the deed
to someone whose fortune is made of other people’s lungs.
Listen: the promise is always simple—
“trust us,” they say, while they unpick the seams.
And you, aching and hungry and stubbornly human,
you watch the ledger until you forget your name.
You learn to prefer the spectacle of blame to the work of care,
to swallow the insult if the insult points elsewhere.
Trump taught them how to shout their hate into the floodlight,
to make cruelty glitter and call it armour.
Here, she borrows the playbook and the accent—
the same cheap thunder, the same small populist tricks,
and you learn to cheer because the thunder echoes the ache in you.
It does not matter if the next cut is yours.
It does not matter that policy could lift the whole room,
that hospitals could breathe again, that classrooms could hold more light.
What matters is the reflection: seeing your hatred mirrored in the office,
a sanction stamped on the people you despise.
That reflection tastes like power, so you drink.
You will let them roast the rivers for a dollar,
make a back-alley deal of our future for a quick profit,
and call it sovereignty while someone your grandmother’s age
waits in a queue they swore would never be for her.
You will vote for the punishment you say you loathe,
because the punishment is for someone else, and you are safe—
for now.
And so democracy decays: not by the fist of a single tyrant,
but by the quiet consent of people who prefer revenge
to remedy, who choose fear as comfort.
Evil is banal and brilliant—its worst trick is making us complicit.
Still. Listen to the small things that refuse it:
a nurse’s steady hand, a child who keeps reading, the neighbour
who refuses to look away. Those are the ledgers we should tally.
When the ledger flips, when the receipts are burned and counted,
they will call it chaos. They will call it loss.
We will call it reckoning.
We will call it repair.
We will call it the work of undoing the neat arithmetic of hate,
and building, stubborn as moss, something that holds everyone.
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