The Every

by Dave Eggers

We had two pandemics

“Ah, the citizenry,” Wes said. “I like them. They always do the right thing.”

“That’s why the wall came down. People wanted choices. They wanted a free market.”

In a few weeks there were hundreds of humans living in tents in a ragged ring between the Bay’s rough and rising sea and the Every campus, providing the starkest reminder of what happens when a society has a threadbare safety net and no plan for those who fall through it—and, more pointedly, what happens when the largest companies in the state and the nation and world somehow find ways to avoid paying taxes.

“It’s as un-American as communism, as treason, as mass incarceration. Every one of these things are affronts to liberty.

“Who cares about monopolies when we’re facing the death of the planet?”

She was tempted to mention that the Every had never paid taxes locally, or in the state, or federally, or anywhere, nor had its founders, and that the paying of taxes might go a long way toward feeding and housing and empowering the unhoused among them, but she would be wasting her breath.

are we more effective agitating from outside, or creating structural change from within?”