When did feeding the hungry and curing the sick become a worthless collective good?
Can you imagine a world where folks that are materially better off come together and decide to help the poor in a faraway land by sending them goods and medicine? Each of us could decide to do this individually, taking food and medicine ourselves. But that’s simply oftentimes impractical.
Would it not be much better for us as a community to collect money to pay those among us that know how to grow food and those that produce the medicine, and then ship the goods to those far away places? There we could work with faith communities and volunteers – and of course the local folks – to get the food and medicine to those that need it most.
Of course we’d know that there are bad elements in each step in the process that are bound to abuse the good will of the community. There’d be those that overcharge for the production, others that would steal some of the goods along the way, and others that would resale the free goods to make a profit.
But we would work to minimize these losses. We would do financial audits, we would analyze the process to identify inefficiencies, and we would constantly improve. However, we would never just dismantle the project and simply leave people to starve without food and die without medicine.
We would never do that because we as a community are people of good will, a generous people. We understand that helping others is a good thing, it pays dividends that are incalculable. It is, to those folks of faith, doing God’s work.
And that my friends, is exactly what we were doing when we as a nation decided to use a limited amount of our tax dollars (our collective chest) to pay our farmers in the heartland to grow certain food that we would buy from them and have it shipped to other parts of the world where we would contract with faith groups and locals to distribute. And that’s exactly what we did when the government partnered with major drug manufacturers to produce life-saving medication to distribute throughout the world.
We did this with the knowledge that it is an imperfect system. We know that some unscrupulous farmers would over charge, that some drug manufacturers may over charge, that some faith groups would take advantage of certain contractual loopholes, and that there would be inevitable graft at the local level.
But we also knew that these ‘bad actors’ were the exception, not the rule. We knew that the vast majority of the folks in the supply chain of getting the food and medication to where it is most needed are honest folks proud to be part of projects that demonstrate our national collective good will. And the vast majority of taxpayers are happy that their elected officials and workers throughout the government, faith and private sector supply chain are honest people of good will trying to do their best to deliver on the collective decision that helping the poor in far away places is a good, humane value.
We know that helping the poor far away in no way negates our responsibility to help those nearer to us, in our local community. We can do both.
Do we have to address the waste and graft in the process? Of course!
But to do what this new Administration is doing, taking a sledge hammer to a system that has generally worked for decades and has served the common good as decided by the general population through the policies adopted by elected representatives and implemented by competent agencies and partners is simply not the way to improve a good thing. Destroying agencies like USAID, which in turn decapitates the capacity of other agencies – many of which are faith based – to do their work, is just plain wrong. It is also shortsighted, as these programs create immense good will towards America and ferments relationships that change hearts and minds. Worse yet is how they are doing it! Dehumanizing the people served as well as the people that do the serving; being facetious and insulting to those that have given of their life and livelihood for years – decades! – committed to this public good; and providing no alternative, leaving people to literally die of hunger and die because their medication is no longer available.
When did feeding the hungry and curing the sick become a worthless collective good? What Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and their accomplices are doing is nothing short of a moral crime against humanity. We have to hold them accountable.
We do not have to let this stand. It is our collective money. It is our collective decision. Collectively we have decided that we are willing to contribute through taxation to this worthy cause of providing food and medicine to the needy of the world. Let’s not let this Administration take that away from us.
Let’s not let their complete and total lack of compassion infect our collective will. We are a good people. We can come together to reverse this madness. Yes, we can do this!