Gaslit, Episode 10

In Episode 10 of Gaslit: The Power of Story, I sat down with the people behind Direct Action Against CenterPoint Energy. What struck me most wasn’t just the scale of the harm people are living through. It was the fact that ordinary residents had to build an entire parallel public-education system—because the official system does not explain itself, does not simplify itself, and does not protect people the way most of us assume it should.

This didn’t start as a political project. It started the way so many crises start in this region: a household bill jumped, the math stopped making sense, and people realized they were alone unless they found each other. That’s the origin story.

One of the clearest realities that surfaced in this conversation is how thoroughly people underestimate the labor of survival. Getting “assistance” isn’t assistance when accessing it becomes another job: paperwork, transportation, time windows, phone trees, eligibility barriers, and dead ends. The problem is that the system is working exactly as designed: exhausting people until they stop pushing.

And that brings me to the bigger point of this episode. This story is not just about bills. It’s about civic reality versus civic mythology.

Most people are not living with enough spare time, money, or bandwidth to decode utility structures, regulatory language, or legislative procedure. They’re working, parenting, caregiving, managing health issues, trying to keep groceries in the house, and trying not to fall behind. So, when the cost of something as basic as electricity becomes unstable, when bills become shock events, it doesn’t land as a “policy issue.” It lands as fear. It lands as instability. It lands as a threat to dignity.

This episode also makes something else unavoidable: the harm doesn’t end at the bill itself. Shutoffs are not just an administrative action. They create cascading consequences: medical risk, food spoilage, inability to heat or cool a home, job disruption, housing instability, and long-term trauma, especially for kids. If a community is going to take this crisis seriously, we have to speak about disconnection as what it is: a destabilizing event with real human costs.

So here is my conclusion, stated plainly.

No one loses power in silence.

Not one senior. Not one family. Not one child. Not in this region.

From this point forward, every shutoff needs to become visible, not because anyone should be shamed, but because the system must be exposed. The goal is to make disconnection socially, politically, and operationally expensive for the company to carry out. If the system can impose unbearable costs on households, then the community can impose public costs on the act of disconnecting a neighbor.

That cost is time. That cost is attention. That cost is crisis management. That cost is reputational pressure. That cost is organized storytelling that turns private suffering into public record.

Because when the response is coordinated: when disconnection triggers immediate, loud, documented pushback through every available channel, the company no longer gets to treat shutoffs like a quiet line item. It becomes a recurring public event with consequences that they must manage. That pressure is not a substitute for policy change. It is a tool to force policy change—because in a world where rates are extreme and unaffordable by design, the moral burden cannot be placed on individuals for “failing” to keep up. The burden belongs to the system that created the conditions.

And I want to be explicit about the reasoning here: visibility is leverage. Silence is permission.

If the system expects people to absorb this privately, alone, embarrassed, and exhausted, then the system wins. If the community refuses to let harm stay hidden, the system must respond. Over and over. Every single time.

This is not about rage. It’s about accountability. It’s about insisting that basic necessities cannot be treated like punishments for being poor, working class, disabled, elderly, or simply stuck inside an economy that is squeezing people from every direction.

This is a call to action, but it’s also a call to solidarity. If you have power and your neighbor doesn’t, that’s not just their crisis. It’s a community emergency. If you’ve ever wondered what collective action actually looks like at the human scale, it starts here: refusing to let disconnection be invisible.

I’m going to keep telling these stories. I’m going to keep documenting what is happening to real people in this region. And I’m going to keep naming the truth that this episode reinforces: people are not failing. The system is failing. And we are done treating that failure like normal life.