I’m an ex-Catholic who renounced his affiliation with modern-day Christianity a while ago, so I need you to explain this to me like I’m a 6-year-old:
Why do so many people who proclaim themselves Christians believe so strongly that abortion is a sin that they’ll vote for the most corrupt, unfit president in history, but then will cheer him on as he slashes programs that’ll result in the suffering and starvation deaths of tens of thousands of children?
Again, please keep your explanation simple.
While you’re working on that let’s look at what’s going on as reported in a recent story from the Associated Press titled, “Children die as USAID aid cuts snap a lifeline for the world’s most malnourished.”
The Trump administration has cut more than 90 percent of the United States Agency for International Development’s foreign aid contracts and $60 billion in overall assistance around the world, the AP reported.
The consequences could be one million children not receiving treatment for severe malnutrition, resulting in an additional 163,000 deaths per year, according to Shawn Baker, chief program officer at Helen Kelly Intl and former chief nutritionist at USAID.
Worldwide, USAID funds about half of the therapeutic foods for treating malnutrition in children, with 40 percent of the supplies produced in the United States, Baker explained.
Foreign aid goes for more than just food. It also helps in the areas of health care and shelter. Kate Phillips-Barrasso, Mercy Corps’ vice president for policy and advocacy, said 40 of its 62 U.S.-funded programs with the potential to reach 3.5 million people in almost a dozen countries have been terminated.
The AP story puts a face on this crisis in the person of Yagana Bulama, a 40-year-old Nigerian woman who, along with about 400,000 others, receives assistance at the humanitarian hub of Dikwa.
Bulama previous had three young triplets die of starvation. Now she’s lost one of her twins to the same fate just two weeks after a therapeutic feeding program operated by Mercy Corps ended due to the Trump cuts.
“I don’t want to bury another child,” she said.
Bulama’s surviving baby is being supported by a UNICEF therapeutic feeding center nearby, but its capacity is stretched and it’s turning away many people previously served by other aid groups that have pulled out due to funding cuts, the AP reported.
Intersos, an Italian humanitarian organization, has the only remaining facility providing in-patient malnutrition services in Dikwa. Its workers are overwhelmed, and its funding from the Nigerian Humanitarian Fund, which comes from a few European countries, is expected to run out in June.
It’s not just the United States that’s cut funding. Trond Jensen, head of the United Nations humanitarian office in Maiduguri, Borno, said the European Union is among other donors who are giving less.
But I’m not interested in whataboutism here. This country’s actions are morally reprehensible. If you’re using what some other countries do as an excuse then you can’t then turn around and call yourself the greatest country in the world.
We’re supposed to be better than that.
So, we watch as Republicans in the House prepare to vote on a spending plan that’ll partially balance $4.5 trillion in tax cuts, mainly for the rich, by cutting programs that help the poor.
We watch as the man that the plurality of voters in this country wanted to be president oversees a seemingly endless list of draconian spending cuts with no concern over who gets hurt or who dies, all while the GOP gives a thumbs up to dishing out millions on his golf trips and a totally unnecessary military parade.
We watch as hate, a lack of empathy, and the embrace of cruelness have become standard operating procedure for right-wing politics in this country, and we see the number of innocent victims of this politically driven abomination mount.
As we see all this unfold, some might be inclined to wonder: What the hell ever happened to this country’s moral compass – if we ever had one in the first place?
And if we did, can we ever get it back?
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Written by RickElia. Cross-posted from Daily Kos.
