Helplessly Hoping

“To ease another’s heartache is to forget one’s own.” — Abraham Lincoln

The natural world can usually restore the human heart when careening human endeavors seem bound for collapse. In my youth, when great leaders were being killed and my own death in a war seemed a realistic possibility, I often went for long runs through nearby woods or down gravel roads cut along lakesides up in Michigan. What was stirring in my gut and my mind was usually becalmed. The inland lakes are deep and blue and stable with their glacial eternity and there are dark woods with soft trails at the end of many streets. When they took my father away for treatment, my brother and I went to a pond a quarter mile from our house and used glass jars to capture pollywogs swimming in the cool spring water. Nothing in those woods ever changed and I think the tall maples and spindly birches with their leaves fluttering in the wind gave us a bit of comfort with their immoveable stature. Even though we were just boys, we were able to appreciate the fractured sunlight bouncing off the pond and creating a beauty on the edge of a suburban development.

I am certain most Americans are seeking mental sanctuary today as our country comes undone. There are fewer woods, and water in Texas is disappearing so we have to watch carefully for any spot to hide from the chaos or momentarily escape from the broadcast realities. Just days ago on a business trip to the Texas-Mexico border, I was able to distract myself with a sea of sunflowers. South of Interstate 10, which crosses the state from El Paso to San Antonio and then onto Houston and over to Louisiana, crops have already reached a stature suggesting harvest is near. The corn presently stands six feet tall and sunflowers are heavy with seeds and beginning to lean in the slightest breeze. A grower along U.S. Highway 281 may have the largest crop in all the land because it spreads beyond the field of vision in every direction away from the highway.

I was not in a hurry, which allowed me to linger and listen to the wind and stare in wonder at the impossible growth of a sunflower sea. The challenge was to be present, to not think about the unabated destruction of our government and programs that sustain lives and facilitate education and a clean and unpolluted landscape. My goal was to drain my brain of the horrors I had heard detailed on a broadcast regarding the U.S. budget bill. While I got a moment of quietude, the absolute obliviousness to politics, which was my aspiration, was essentially impossible. An expert had been talking on my car radio about the harm already caused by the president using executive orders before his budget was even drafted. According to the reporter, the Hellen Keller International organization estimated that 21 million people, including 11 million children, are at immediate risk in foreign countries due to halted nutrition and healthcare support. Collectively, the stroke of one venal man’s pen ended USAID food and other assistance programs that have turned hunger and death into realities for an estimated 50 million people worldwide.

Back in the car, I returned to listening to music and teed up Tom Russell, who sings of the borderland with greater insight than anyone I know. His song, “California Snow” exquisitely renders the struggles of immigrants and the Border Patrol living and working along the “Tecate Line,” which is, essentially the legal border between California and Mexico. The lyrics, though, brought me back to the historic suffering in the land I was passing through, which seemed so unnecessary. As I crossed into Brooks County I recalled hearing its sheriff, Benny Martinez, saying he estimated there might be as many as 10,000 dead lying out in the brush there, victims of dehydration and starvation after attempting to get north without being detected by Border Patrol. More than 1,000, most unidentified, have been interred in Sacred Heart Cemetery in Falfurrias. Unfortunately, numerous burials were conducted without proper documentation or identification, often placing multiple sets of remains in a single grave. Reports indicate that some bodies were moved into trash bags, cardboard boxes, or other makeshift containers, and buried without markers or records, which means they are unlikely to ever be identified.

The road south is long, though, and the sunshine and singing did not keep my mind from wandering across the remains of my country’s democracy, which is becoming a kind of bombed out landscape where law and equality were once rising monoliths. What Trump is doing to the developing world, the U.S. Congress, which he controls, has passed legislation to also do to Americans, and the numbers demand national scrutiny. His budget of $1.5 trillion in tax cuts, predominately for the rich, may be the greatest upward transfer of wealth in history from the poor to those who do not need more money.

Three hundred billion of that total will be taken from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) that provides food to 14 million children in the U.S., who also receive Medicaid health care. Nearly 45% of all children in this country, about 34 million, rely on those two programs to meet basic needs. The situation is particularly dire in Texas where one million children are without any form of health care. A $600 billion dollar cut in Medicaid in Trump’s bill will deliver a crisis for the young and disadvantaged in low-income and marginalized communities across the country. The result will be increased food insecurity, developmental delays, and long-term health issues. The consequences, according to one expert, are expected to be "serious and generational in scope." There is, in fact, approximately 60,000 metric tons of food, sufficient to feed 3.5 million people for a month, $489 million dollars worth, rotting in unused storage facilities and ports across the globe due to Trump and Musk’s demand for an immediate halt of USAID funding.

None of this registers, of course, with Trump or his enablers in Congress and the Republican Party. While he held a dinner for more than 200 people who paid at least a million dollars for his worthless meme coin, children in his country and overseas are enduring suffering and dying from hunger and a lack of medicine and treatments. A study published in Nature suggests that if the U.S. permanently ends its global health aid, up to 25 million people could die over the next 15 years due to the collapse of programs targeting HIV, TB, malaria, maternal health, and child nutrition. The African health authority, meanwhile, CDC Africa, indicates that setbacks in healthcare due to Trump’s funding cuts could result in 2 to 4 million deaths, particularly affecting maternal and child health services.

Let us not worry, though, since the food didn’t look very good at his meme coin dinner where he was auctioning off access to the American presidency. Diners suffered, too.

As Trump sold the U.S. presidency to foreign nationals with money, those without cash were dying in the South Texas brush country and in African deserts and hospitals, starving in Sudan, Yemen, Syria, Afghanistan, Uganda, and soon, in your American hometown, because he wanted to give a tax cut to the wealthy and increase taxes on the low-income earners. The room where his corrupt dinner was served had a leaderboard that showed how much money each guest had invested in Trump and his meaningless meme coin. There ought to have also been an electronic ticker across the room that flashed with the rising numbers of dead in U.S. states and countries across the globe.

I passed another field of sunflowers and hardly noticed the beauty, and wondered, instead, if there were dead out there, lying still beneath the quivering petals.