Remember the number 600,000.
According to different independent studies, that’s the number of people estimated to have died since Donald Trump and Elon Musk destroyed the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) that was founded by Congress in 1961.
400,000 of that number have been children, yes, children, innocent children who needed basic food items, medicine, and vaccinations in order to survive their extreme poverty circumstances, including famines.
They didn’t get any of it, Trump and Musk choosing instead to let the food rot and the medicine and vaccines spoil in warehouses. The results – 400,000 children and 200,000 adults have died.
This is not who we are as a nation.
But it is who Trump and Musk are. When Bill Gates said of Musk, “The picture of the world’s richest man killing the world’s poorest children is not a pretty one,” he spoke the truth about Trump as well as Musk.
Since 1961 USAID is estimated to have saved 92 million people from starvation and disease. Trump and Musk decided those people were not worth it, insisting instead that government spending needed to be cut.
Yet, they were so incompetent, they couldn’t even do that. When all factors are considered, experts suggest DOGE will have cost the US government around 36 billion dollars.
If there is anyone who should be deported back to his country of origin, it is Elon Musk. But that’s not who we are as a nation, and he of all people should be thankful we’re not.
He should be thankful that we have not become the America Trump wants us to become, a reflection of himself.
That is not going to happen because most Americans are saying by their disapproval of what Trump is doing that he is not who they are and they are not who he is.
I give thanks to God for that on this Thanksgiving.
We can, of course, recite all of the things wrong with our country, and all of the ways we have failed to live up to the ideals we claim to stand for, and well we should, but none of those things erases all the good things we are and all the great things we have done as a nation, such as the millions we have helped through programs like USAID.
That’s what Thanksgiving is really about. Not pretending we are better than we are, but showing gratitude that we are not as bad as we might have been, that we have done some good, noble, and even righteous things as a people.
If there was ever a year to focus on our better selves at Thanksgiving, to express gratitude for those times when our better angels have guided our thoughts and actions, it is this year.
We’re not out of the woods yet on how the Trump second presidency will affect us long term, but on this Thanksgiving there are more than enough reasons to be thankful that when he is gone we will still be the kind of people we have been trying to be for almost 250 years.
And so I want to say to all of you who read my blog, for which I am sincerely grateful, happy Thanksgiving from my family to yours.
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