You probably get these too: emails asking you to contact various government officials to ask them to be decent human beings or good stewards of the environment or some crap like that. If they were either of those things, we wouldn't have to petition them. So in the part that I can edit I usually try to reach them where they are rather than call them to where the petition sponsor thinks they should be.
The most recent example is a petition to Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins, asking her to release the contingency funds to cover SNAP benefits during the government shutdown. The suggested language was conciliatory and deferential to human rights and values of which this regime has not demonstrated a single scrap. So I took my usual approach.
To: Brooke Rollins, Secretary of Agriculture
At some point, your party's top-down approach to ruling has to become obvious, as it does now in this cold move to use Americans in need as hostages to coerce the Democratic Party to surrender to your party's overall plan to make life more precarious for the working class.
Your party's policies will increase mortality among children, the elderly, and the disabled, three groups that represent little value to a wealthy elite. Children have some utility as future workers, but only if they are sturdy enough to do the work required of them before they are discarded by your system when they get too old or injured. A good example here is how the Republicans pay lip service to military personnel and veterans, while cutting funding for support systems after their service. As for the elderly, just die already, am I right? And the disabled... they never had anything to contribute in the first place. Life ain't the Special Olympics. Eventually, it will be legal to just leave a defective baby out on a frozen hillside to die, won't it? Or maybe part it out for useful organs first. Just because some parts don't work doesn't mean that no parts work. All that lies a little further down the road, but we're at a critical fork right now.
Preventing 42 million Americans—including about 16 million children and nearly 7 million pregnant and postpartum women, infants, and young children—from being able to buy groceries seems unnecessarily cruel and dangerous until you consider that it's a first step toward necessary culling of useless people. The tough will survive. Anyone not tough enough to endure the test is just dead weight on society anyway. Am I getting this right? You know I am.
The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) has an emergency contingency fund, and experts indicate that the US Department of Agriculture is able to use this or other funds to keep food on people’s tables. Or you can siphon off the funds to pay for CBP officers, golf trips, and Gatsby parties. Maybe pay to ship senior military commanders in for another pep talk by Major Hegseth over at the Pentagon.
According to your own shutdown contingency plan, the agency has a reserve of funds, which can be used to pay SNAP benefits directly. In fact, the SNAP Appropriation law’s own language makes the contingency reserve broadly available for program operations. Even in President Trump’s first administration, SNAP benefits were paid out during the government shutdown in late 2018 through early 2019—the longest recorded shutdown in American history—without interruption. You can come through again or admit that was a mistake, a moment of weakness you won't repeat.
I now return you to the earnest entreaty that assumes that you have a core of humanity that can be appealed to. Who knows? Maybe they're right. Surprise me.
No comments:
Post a Comment