Helping, Or Not, In Trump's America

INDISPUTABLY, there is a great deal of wasteful spending within the federal budget. One might recall the five hundred dollar toilet seats which reared their ugly heads during, if memory serves, the Reagan administration. The Department of Defense leads the charge of recklessly throwing money around, at problems, as well as billionaires. We now turn our attention to "USAID", a primary agency through which economic assistance is channeled from the United States to the more poor world. We know that foreign aid constitutes less than one percent of the federal budget, and that it amounts to billions of dollars per year. And now we know that our prevaricating president has unilaterally ended USAID, just like that, by decree, without proper authority, with the evident support of congressional Republicans, but not Democrats. Trump's hot blonde spokesperson is a vast upgrade from Sarah Sanders, sight for sore eyes wise, and, arguably, no less capable of echoing Trump's lies with an impressively straight, unblemished face. She mentioned ceramics classes in Africa, funds for Irish folk dancing, and services for transgender folks. What she doesn't mention, what Trump doesn't mention, is the millions of lives which have already been saved by the vaccination and nutrition programs administerd by the agency. Also unmentioned is the reality that because of the demise of these programs, it is estimated that as many as eight million people will starve to death in the war torn, impoverished Sudan. Millions will die in other places as well, of disease and famine. Trump and the Republicans emphisize the wasteful spending, but not the starvation nor the epidemics prevented by American foreign aid. Elon Musk, who knows a thing or two about criminal organizations, if only by serving in the Trump administration, calls USAID "a criminal organization". Again, he's the expert. Takes one to know one, and so forth. The only thing "criminal" about American foreign aid are the people who are ending it. Is the United States a "Christian country" or not? It most certainly is not, neither by heritage nor behavior. It never has been. Ironically, the same people who insist that it is, namely, conservatives, cherry pick the wasteful spending as evidence that the baby should be thrown out with the bath water. They dug deep enough to find a few examples of unnecessary forms of assistance, and declare that the very idea of giving help to people in need is an entirely corrupt undertaking, which must be abolished. Gore Vidal, whose grandfather was the first United States Senator from the newly established state of Oklahoma in the early twentieth century, said of Senator Gore, who was a Republican: "He didn't believe in giving anything to anybody, ever". The late Senator's ideological descendants are now fully dislayed, as our modern Republicans find one excuse after another to stop helping...anybody. We have entered the era of conservative Republican governance. Like an increasingly popular T shirt proclaims: "We are being governed by morons". If not morons, pseudo Christians, Christians in name only. Render unto Caesar. Give unto the poor. Welcome the stranger. These fundamental precepts of the Christian faith will never be uttered nr enacted by our right wing extremist gangster leaders, who much prefer the harsh simplistic Ten Commandments to the Sermon On the Mount or the Beatitudes. If you pay close close attention, you will notice that Trump, his, his personal cult, and the Republican party will never ever be caught, dead or alive...helping anybody.