On Sweet Potatoes and Solidarity

Tending life in hostile conditions—and finding each other there.

In the wake of brutal budget cuts, we return to what our ancestors knew: prevention, mutual aid, and care outside the state. A sweet potato in water. Herbs on a windowsill. We grow anyway. And we grow together.

Sunday Musings: The Aftermath of the Big Bad Bill

There was once a sweet potato sitting in a vase on my windowsill. I didn’t plant it—not really. It had started to sprout on its own, so I set the base in water and left it alone. Within a few days, roots curled down like hesitant fingers, and soon after, green shoots reached up and out, bending toward the light. If I’d let them, they would have vined and sprawled across the wall—delicate but insistent. The leaves are edible, soft and full of nutrients. In many parts of Asia, this is common knowledge—practical, unassuming, handed down. You don’t need soil or special tools. Just a bit of time, and a bit of trust in what will come. It’s a small thing, but it stays with me.

This week, as the dust settles from the passing of what they’ve started calling the Big Beautiful Budget Bill—though really, it’s anything but—I keep returning to the memory of that sweet potato. To the quiet of it. The self-sufficiency. The way it reached, regardless of the context it was given. And I suppose I’ve been wondering what it might look like, for all of us, to start growing again—not just food, but frameworks for care that don’t rely on a state that’s made it increasingly clear: we are not its priority.

Cuts to healthcare, education, food supports. A gutting of the very safety nets many of us were already falling through. And all the while, in the US, a bloated ICE budget looms, heavy with implications. It’s hard not to feel like the curtain’s been pulled back—not on some grand betrayal, but on something far more banal: a confirmation of what many already knew. The systems meant to support us are being hollowed out, consolidated, sold off. What’s left is a kind of medical theatre. A state that calls it “coverage” when what we actually receive is conditional, delayed, or entirely out of reach. Especially if you’re rural. Especially if you’re poor. Especially if you’re disabled, or trans, or undocumented.

So we grow sweet potatoes. Or herbs on the windowsill. Or radishes in repurposed totes. We organise health pods and seed swaps. We learn what our grandparents knew before supermarkets and urgent cares. We cook for each other, walk with each other, remind one another to take meds or drink water or rest. Because the truth is, there’s no cavalry coming. And maybe that’s not a reason to despair—maybe it’s a reason to begin again. To root where we are. To sprout anyway. Quiet, visible, alive.

They Never Planned to Care

It’s not a surprise, not really. The budget bill passed, and with it came deep cuts to the programmes that once gave people a tenuous hold on care—Medicaid, Medicare, SNAP, Title I education, IDEA support for disabled students. The floor was already rotting; now it’s buckled clean through. And in its place? A windfall for ICE and DHS. The architecture of enforcement expands whilst the scaffolding of support is torn down beam by beam. It’s a familiar pattern—just drawn in thicker lines now.

Even the funds that were allocated by Congress—like billions already earmarked for public education—are being illegally impounded by the executive branch. Held back. Withheld. As if children learning to read or eat or exist with support is some kind of threat to national security. And in a way, maybe it is—because cared-for people are harder to control.

Obamacare once promised access, and for some, it did open doors. But for many of us, what we got was coverage without care. In rural areas, it meant overpriced plans with deductibles no one could meet. It meant networks so narrow they might as well not exist. It meant private equity firms buying up hospitals, loading them with debt, stripping them bare, then walking away. What remains are ghost systems—clinics too understaffed to function, emergency rooms hours away, urgent cares reduced to urgent costs.

And it’s always the same people left out first, worst, and longest: rural folks, poor folks, disabled folks. Trans folks. Black and brown communities. Migrants. People already forced to patch together their own care from scraps, now being asked to survive with even less.

But here’s the thing: survival has never come from these systems. Not really. What’s kept us going—what’s kept us alive—is each other. We’re not waiting for the institutions that were never built for us to suddenly recognise our worth. We’re not asking to be seen by the people who’ve made a business of our invisibility. We’re building something else.

And that’s not a tragedy. It’s a turning point.

Because whilst the state sharpens its budgets and builds more border walls, we’re tending to herbs on the windowsill. We’re passing soups, tinctures, homegrown greens. We’ve got neighbour chats, medicine swaps, group walks, garden shares. The kind of care that doesn’t come with a billing code, or a copay, or a penalty.

It’s not perfect. It’s not always enough. But it’s real.

And it’s growing.

What We Can Do Instead

I’ve been thinking about my grandmother lately—her garden, her preserves, her Marxist pen pals. She used to write to people across the world in Esperanto, exchanging letters and the occasional small gift, like tea or seeds. She was working-class and on a pension, but her kitchen was always full. Shelves lined with cans and jars she’d sealed herself, rows of herbs hung to dry, root veg tucked into crates beneath the sink. She didn’t talk about it like it was some kind of grand philosophy—but everything she did was focused on prevention. Complete nutrition. Clean water. Daily movement, even if it was just the rhythm of tending to things. And at the end of the day, a wee dram to settle the nerves.

She was never wealthy, but she was sovereign in a way I’m only beginning to understand. And in her letters, those that she shared with me, there were always glimpses of another world. A world on the other side of the Western blockade. It wasn’t utopia, but it wasn’t helplessness either. It was care, shared across borders and language, under siege but still breathing. Still growing.

I think about that a lot now, especially as the systems around us fracture further. We can’t afford to think of care as something we buy. Not anymore. And maybe not ever.

So what do we do instead?

We start small. We eat well when we can. We stretch our bodies, sit in the sun, take walks with people we trust. We grow what we’re able—radishes in repurposed tubs, basil in coffee tins, sweet potatoes in jars of water. Potatoes in burlap sacks We share what we grow. We learn what our great-grandparents knew without needing to be told: that herbs are medicine, that food is more than fuel, that movement is part of health, not separate from it.

We form health pods, not as institutions but as commitments. A few people who agree to check in on each other, share resources, remind one another to take their meds or eat something green. We start seed swaps, skillshares, mutual aid apothecaries. We teach each other how to identify wild plants, how to make a salve, how to cook nourishing food on a shoestring. We refuse the lie that care must be professionalised to be real.

Because here’s the truth: the Soviets didn’t focus on prevention because they were backwards. They did it because they were embargoed, isolated, and under siege. So are we. That doesn’t make their methods any less wise.

If anything, it makes them more urgent now.

And so, we don’t wait. We grow anyway.

The Sweet Potato Doctrine

There’s something about the sweet potato that stays with me. Not just the ease of it, the way it takes to water without complaint—but the quiet insistence of its growth. It doesn’t need perfect conditions. It doesn’t need permission. It just roots where it can, reaches for the light, and begins again.

It’s that act of beginning again that feels holy, somehow. Especially now.

Because tending to life in hostile conditions is not new for many of us. Disabled people, neurodivergent people—we’ve always known how to survive outside the bounds of official systems. We’ve had to. We carry blueprints in our bodies for care that isn’t billable, for solutions that don’t come from above. Whether it's scripting conversations to feel safe, hoarding meds in case insurance fails, or using the same five meals on rotation because they soothe a dysregulated gut—these are forms of knowing. Forms of surviving. And when shared, they become forms of resistance.

The sweet potato doesn’t ask for perfect soil. It grows anyway.

So maybe this is the doctrine we follow now—not because we chose these conditions, but because we choose to keep each other alive within them. A sweet potato in a jar, a bowl of noodles or soup on a neighbour’s porch, a text checking in, a hand held in the dark. These aren’t fixes. They won’t undo what’s been done. But they are the start of something else. Something rooted. Something alive.

And we’ve done this before. Our grandparents knew how to grow food in cracked soil, how to boil herbs for fevers, how to stretch a meal, how to tend to one another’s grief in the absence of a therapist’s couch. These are not lost arts. They’re sleeping ones.

And maybe now is the time to wake them.

Final thoughts …

So, what are you growing?

It doesn’t have to be much. Maybe it’s a pot of mint on the windowsill, or some scallions in a jar. Maybe it’s a shelf of dried herbs, a stack of letters waiting to be sent, a recipe passed down through hands that never made it into a book. Maybe it’s not food or medicine at all, but something quieter—a routine check-in with a friend, a shared walk in the evening, a note left on the fridge that simply says, “You’re not alone.”

Who do you check in with?
Who checks in with you?

What would it take to form a health pod, a garden pod, a small circle of mutual care that doesn’t wait for the state to sanction its legitimacy?

You don’t need to know everything. You don’t need to do it perfectly. Start with what you have. A sprout. A kettle boiled for noodles. A story remembered. A neighbour’s name.

Because the care we offer each other now is the infrastructure of the future.

And we are growing.