The dismantling of USAID a year later and what it says about us as a country

Source: PBS.org

I love John Oliver. I hate watching his show.

Actually, I don’t hate watching his show; however, I’d be lying if I said that the topics he covers are often guaranteed to generate a wave of anger that requires immediate attention.

He recently covered the dismantling of USAID a year after DOGE and the Regime went to town on it. When it was first announced what they were doing, the responses were vocal and that the results of destroying the United States’ flagship of goodwill and the most effective agency for combating starvation, illness, and death would be scores of millions displaced, sick, and dead.

I’mi not going to repeat Oliver’s figures or research, though. I don’t even need, much less want to review the ghoulishness criminality of the likes of Mike Benz, and others who actually celebrated the agency’s demise. What I do want to consider is the disconnect between people who espouse Christian love and compassion but celebrate the destruction of lives across the world (and even in their own backyard).

I am more than aware that Benny Johnson, Elon Musk, Lindsey Graham, Marco Rubio, Jeremy Lewin, and Mike Benz are garbage. They are. They have cheered the demise of one of the most effective humanitarian programs and celebrated post facto, the displacement, danger, sickness, and death that has fallen and will continue to fall on populations across the world. The dismembering of USAID is, as far as I’m concerned, mass murder. And not one of these assholes can say, “we didn’t know.” Their racism and hatred of anyone not white is writ large and is well known and frankly, it starts at the top with the current occupier in the White House.

While all this is well-known and a matter of record, it should be equally disturbing that a significant portion of the US population shares these views or if they do not, they are ignorant enough to buy the party line that USAID was overrun by Marxists and “looney leftists.”

I’ve bemoaned ad nauseam, I know, how precipitously political and civil discourse in this country has fallen. What makes this more difficult and more frustrating/infuriating (bipolarity that shifts moment to moment) is that this precipitous descent reflects a similar plummeting of something like national ethics, if not morality. The moral high road that many Americans had prided themselves on is long gone. And believe me, very often that high road was built on sand, but what has changed is the increased desire for visiting blood and suffering on others both at home and across the globe.

Which brings me to the disconnect. It’s likely worthless to litigate this and regurgitate it, but I believe there is value in keeping in mind that your neighbor may be either completely oblivious to the suffering of others and only considers it when reminded or prompted to (maybe at church, maybe in conversation, maybe when someone he knows is in pain) or he may actually support the Regime’s project of inflicting suffering on whomever it targets. Even if it includes himself.

We often hear that supporters of the Regime are taken aback when they’re subjected to its cruelty because they believed they wouldn’t be so targeted or because they simply had the bad luck to be caught up in a larger project to - what? - “protect the Homeland”? Or the best, “They’re hurting the wrong people!”, meaning, of course, dumb white people. Dumb, racist white people.

Whatever moral imperative there once was to “love your neighbor” has certainly been erased. I recall a few years ago, a person I was working on a data project with complained about her next door neighbor from Pakistan, if I recall. Anyway, she found her neighbor pushy, but nice enough; but she lived in utter fear of others in her subdivision who were likely mostly South Asian Muslims. I got tired of telling her to quit it; they’re not people to fear and if anything, Muslims across the board are often the most welcoming and community-minded people I’ve met, both in South Asia and in the U.S. More recently, I was directed to a post of hers on Facebook in reply to a meme saying “If you think President Trump is the Greatest President ever, post “YES!” In the comments.” She posted accordingly and the first thing I thought of was the tragedy of this woman; talented, college educated, a Christian, and not lacking in compassion supporting a Regime that has destroyed this country from within and visited death and destruction on untold millions (not an exaggeration) around the world, alienated our allies, and doomed us to inflation, increased risk of disease, inadequate responses to natural disasters, and frankly, death. But hey, she thinks the guy occupying the White House like a public restroom is the greatest prez ever.

College educated, a gifted musician, and not a bad person. Not a profile that should align with fascist-racist ideology. Also, she’s hardly one of the deep-pocketed Republican supporters. Indeed, she got by well enough when I knew her, but she also espoused the idea that both parties were equally reprehensible. Let’s look at that.

Anyone who knows me (and if you’re read anything here), knows I don’t hold the Democratic Party in the highest esteem, BUT the two main parties are different. And the further down the road we go, the more it becomes plain how different they are. We are well beyond the anodyne days when “spending like a drunken Democrat” was a thing or when Republicans were simply “the business party”. When I was coming up, I got a quick schooling in false narratives and capitalism-as-national-straitjacket. If the Republican Party was often driven to deregulating industry at all costs and actually expanding the powers of the Executive Branch repeatedly, the Democrats were as much beholden to corporate dollars, lobbyists, and themselves perfectly capable of allowing the Executive broader powers. However, as individuals, I found that more Democrats in office were genuinely invested in representing their communities, and if I have never taken anything any president as truthful, by and large, there was an espousal of doing what’s right by all Americans. And yes, Republican presidents up until this one currently in office would make those noises, too.

But things are different now and the cruelty is the point, it is the policy and millions of Americans are supportive, either by silence or loudly. Why? Racism aside? There’s always this chestnut: “we spend too much helping out the rest of the world and no one does anything for us or pays their fair share.” Utter bullshit when you consider that USAID’s funding was less than one percent of the national budget. Indeed, a country that has always provided an overabundance for weaponry, war, and policing its own populace has usually thrown coins into the pot for helping out other countries. What no one seems to take away from this is just how much more effective the eradication of poverty and sickness could have been - again, both at home and abroad - if more agencies had been better funded and supported. But of course, that’s socialism. Goddammit. I cannot tell you how fucking stupid that refrain is.

Thankfully, we have health and education systems that are so robust that they’re the envy of the world.</dripping_sarcasm> Not like those backward socialist countries in Norther Europe. You know, the ones we want to look like but whose politics are guided by nuance and very often, more popularly engaged with.

Or there’s the repeated canard that our borders are (were) too open and too many people were coming here and why can’t they fix their own damn problems? I suspect there will be more of us going into voluntary exile as the Regime heats up, but that aside, our immigration system was often broken but not always because “we let too many people in.” Policies and restrictions on visits, green cards, and immigration in general, were confusing and contradictory. We were never overridden by border crossings; to hear Republicans - many who had never been too our southwestern states - tell of it, there were waves of Mexicans and South Americans overrunning the Rio Grande and flooding into Texas or further west, descending en masse on the Baja in California and taking over whole regions of New Mexico, Arizona, and Nevada.

Yes, large numbers of people fleeing persecution in their countries were driven by situations so hopeless, they exhausted other options of not getting disappeared, tortured, or murdered to come here. And yes, others were mostly migrants who just wanted to earn a better wage to help their families back home out or to even establish a foundation toward living in the U.S. None of this is unreasonable, but what is unreasonable is that instead of addressing these issues early on and responsibly, politicians decided to use immigration as a dog-whistle to get into or stay in office. This was bipartisan. If Democrats had been at all serious about establishing solutions to immigration whenever they held the House and the Presidency, we might not be having these discussion. But like their Republican counterparts, they found it easier to say “we’re working on it” or worse, “the problem is too complex” and offload it onto successors.

However, much of the population would rather join in the casual and not-so-casual xenophobia and racism in demonizing immigrants. It’s just easier and doesn’t require any action on their part except to reduce the newcomer to this land to an inconvenient cypher upon which to heap disdain, if not abuse.

All of this is to say that we have grown into the equivalent of a comic book version of Neanderthal man. Not too bright, prone to fear, and ready to lash out in naked anger at whatever affronts his person.

Racism, xenophobia, homophobia, transphobia, and on and on are the benchmarks of ignorance, some of it passively absorbed but very often, willful and consciously adopted. We talk about how divided the country is, but it’s not between political beliefs but moral ideals. So what are we to do? Is there any hope for us as a society?

I have my doubts. We know that most people don’t change their minds based on data or statistics. If we are talking about changing minds of a group, the only thing I can think of would be for a lot of money to be directed into funding messages that counter the State’s propaganda. The other approach has to be one-on-one, and this requires listening and not getting enflamed (I haven’t, historically, been very good at that; calling someone a “fucking racist” doesn’t do much except elicit the reaction of “I am not!”, and the silence that follows). I’ve had productive discussions about other hot-point issues, but immigration and international aid aren’t two of them. However, if I don’t try, I won’t know what works.

The best I can come up with is to challenge people in some way that leads them to see what they’re supporting, what they’re saying. In Oliver’s piece, Elon Musk asked to be shown a picture of what USAID does (did?). I don’t think that would work on him. I really don’t. Oliver closed his episode by saying that the footage his team decided to show was the least disturbing of what was available. It might be time to run counteroffensives and show that footage, if only to let people know that this is what they’re supporting.

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