Walk down the center
From Make America Dream Again — the ethos under the house. One human's voice. No lying.
This one was dictated on foot. A ruined side street, potholed and cracked, no sidewalk on either side; so I walked straight down the center of it, and didn't give a damn. In this house that's not a mood; it's a citation. The arguments here carry where they were made, and this one was made in the middle of a road a city built for cars and forgot to build for people.
Read the act honestly, because it isn't recklessness. Walking down the center of a sidewalk-less street is the only rational response to infrastructure that forgot you exist. The cracked shoulder is worse than the lane; the lane is where the surface still holds. When a place gives a person on foot nowhere safe to walk, walking the center isn't defiance for its own sake; it's the honest read of what the place actually offered, which was nothing. The road tells you where it thinks you belong, and a road with no sidewalk has already told the walker: not here.
A sidewalk is the cheapest dignity a place can build. It is a strip of poured concrete, and it says the whole thing: that a kid, a grandmother, a man with no car, a body that can only move on foot, is expected here and welcome here and safe here. Leave it out and you've signed the opposite testimony in the same ledger the budget always signs; infrastructure is a values document too, and a town that paves five lanes for cars and not one yard of walk for people has written down exactly who it counts. It counts the ones who can pay for a car. The rest walk the center.
So this is the argument and the demand in one: walk the center, and build the sidewalk. Not a luxury, not a nicety, not a line item to cut when the budget tightens; the floor under the pedestrian, the same way the walkable pool and the bus and the bench are the floor (prisons, not pools is the same math, poured in concrete). The dignity is the floor, and sometimes the floor is literally a floor; a flat, safe, unglamorous strip of ground that says a person can get where they're going here without being run down for the crime of not owning a car.
And I'll steelman it, because that's the house rule: sidewalks cost money, rural roads can't all have them, and a grown man choosing the center of a road is making a choice with real risk in it. Granted. But the risk was authored; someone decided, budget in hand, that this street would carry cars and abandon walkers, and the walker inherited a danger he did not design. Score that decision, not the man forced to answer it. (His coin, dictated on the walk, 2026-07-21; the machine held the pen close to his words — refine to his. Values page, labeled opinion; the infrastructure claims are the argument's frame, not cited statistics.)
If the sentence ever feels like it wants to end — in the US, call or text 988 (Suicide & Crisis Lifeline), any hour; or find help anywhere at findahelpline.com. You are not alone, and the story isn’t over.