Policy differences, or culling the herd?

Photo by Daniele Franchi on Unsplash

I have been baffled by certain actions of the administration that seemed self-defeating, in opposition to each other.

On one hand they want women to have more children, even through forcing some women to give birth, implying that increasing birth rates is their goal. On the other, they are decreasing by decree vaccination rates and removing access to health care. These actions will cause the death of some of those forced and unforced births.

I have been unable to understand, “why?”

I think I get it now. Fewer of us, selected for perfection, resistance to disease, and alignment with their policies are cheaper and easier to manage. The people at the top have decided that some people should not make it.

They’d never say it out loud, but when you look at the policies, the budgets, the choices—that’s what they add up to. It is a quiet, as yet unnamed, “culling of the herd.”

Who gets hit first? The ones they can villainize. The ones who make some people afraid because they aren’t well understood. Gay people. Trans people. People with a different skin color, an accent. Faith traditions that are out of favor.

But they move on from there, more subtlety with better communications planning. They attack through disenfranchisement and loss of support these groups: disabled people, old people, people in poor health.  WE ARE HERE.

And then to the poor. They don’t want to eliminate this group. They instead save and deploy them for particular purposes. Like misleading them to mobilize against the fore-mentioned groups and to work for low wages and die quickly when their needs require governmental support to stay alive.

The current administration’s policies indicate that a good plan is to allow the weakest to simply die, quickly through loss of medical care, or more slowly through allowing previously conquered disease to run through the population. They won't cost the nation anything because we will have killed the programs that would have helped them. It's fine for them to live as long as they serve. Neglect will wipe out many in multiple ways. Hostility and deportation takes care of another swath of humanity that “isn’t quite right.”

A better future for this administration looks like people requiring less care, less expense, with more heads nodding in perfect alignment because they know “or else” awaits.

Nonprofit, by our very existence, is the antithesis of this plan. We stand against the building of a perfect human  race in America, which is the path we are on. We want the weak uplifted, the hungry fed, the sick healed, the vulnerable protected. While many people working in the current administration don’t feel this way, our current leadership does. Our Congress has proven too concerned with personal preservation to act. It can only be us.

Yesterday the FCC leaned on a media company because it did not like what a comedian said, and that he played a clip of the president engaged in unseemly discourse. That comedian’s show was pulled. This is the loss of free speech, defined by the government (not a private company) shutting down discourse it did not want. This is who the current administration is. They do not believe in democracy. They believe in autocracy, the only path to cull the herd. They believe in control. They believe in building a more perfect society through subtraction of those it deems unfit, instead of uplifting all humanity. They want to control us, completely.

Will we accept that future for ourselves? For our children?

Organizations like The Arc of the United States, Easterseals and Kendra E. Davenport, MPL, National Council of Nonprofits and Diane Yentel, the American Cancer Society, The Trevor Project and more fight for their particular missions.

But the fight is larger and includes us all regardless of mission. We keep asking specific questions of our legislators like, “Will you support cancer research?”  That’s too specific. That’s the question they want us to ask, diverting us from the larger problem.

The first question should be, “Are you trying to cull the herd?”