Everyone who has been poor, knows how things snowball. A small problem relentlessly accumulates until your life is altered irreparably.

An expensive car repair, a tooth problem, room-mate skips out on lease, etc.

Usually it's about $400 worth of problem.

Your car breaks down, you get a flat.

You use electricity money to pay for your repair, and next month another crisis comes up and the month after you get a final notice.

You hold off going to a dentist until your face swells up so bad you have to take off work.

That missing income, plus the dental bill, bites into your rent payment.

A small problem, which a richer person wouldn't even notice, snowballs, until it ends up with you facing eviction, homelessness.

And that happens in America *before* a pandemic and devastated economy. It's normal, it's how people go homeless every day. Small problems snowballing into the worst day of your life.

What's about to happen, though, won't be a snowballing cascade of misfortune, but will *start out* with the worst case scenario.

It won't be losing a week of work after a back injury, then not being able to pay rent, then getting evicted.

It'll be getting evicted after a 30 second court appearance, and then losing your income source.

Millions of people, half the population in some places, skipping directly into that PTSD-inducing state of desperation that is seeing every thread of your life come apart.

And each will *know* that this time, it wasn't some random crisis that fucked them over.

It wasn't the transmission dying, or needing emergency dental work, or losing hours after an injury, or any number of random misfortunes.

Millions will know that it was deliberate. Completely preventable. Not random whatsoever.

Someone *chose* to do it to them.

When that happens, another kind of snowballing occurs and it tends to end with dead rulers.

Note: those previous snowballs were also deliberate, intentional. Someone chose those as well.

What this does, though, is put a face on the problem. A face, a name, and an address for the person who ruined your life.

It stops being a systemic thing, a feature of capitalism you come to accept.

And it becomes a deliberate choice of this person, right here, who chose to let your kids go hungry or homeless.

It goes from "the healthcare system is fucked and malicious" to "this guy, right here, is the piece of shit who killed my parent."

Millions of people will stop seeing their snowballing catastrophe as a systemic condition, and start seeing it as the deliberate choices of people with faces, names, and addresses.