They Are Our Children Too
I suppose I’m not alone in my Epstein Files fatigue. The political bantering and media attention are incessant and absurd.
A few observations before moving on . . .
Anyone who thinks any salacious Trump details are forthcoming is a fool. The criminals who command the Injustice Department long ago erased any seriously incriminating material.
Fierce Trump supporters will find a way to claim his association with Epstein as proof of his divinity. If pussy-grabbing, sexual assault convictions and leering at teen pageant contestants didn’t tarnish his godliness, a few long-ago party smirks and bad dances won’t dent the teflon. BTW, his dance skills have not improved over the years. The videos with Epstein showed the same pathetic fist moves. YMCA.
Last night as I barked at MSNBC’s inane, repetitive, faux serious opining, I went from cynicism to despair. A commercial break transitioned from Trump’s disgusting nightclub visage to an ad for one of the many charitable organizations seeking donations to feed children. The contrast is telling and heartbreaking. Children in America are food insecure, and our progressive talking heads are blathering on about the goddamn Epstein Files.
Donald Trump is a monster, but his monstrosity should not be measured by flights on Epstein’s plane or the number of 14 year-olds he ogled. We all know he’s an entitled sociopath whose entire life has been spent wallowing in adolescent indulgence, exploiting everyone in his orbit for profit or crude gratification.
The victims of Epstein’s perversion deserve empathy and justice, but this entire tawdry business is child’s play - pardon the accidental double entendre - compared to Trump’s full oeuvre.
I don’t understand, and can’t forgive, the oh-so-sincere “journalists” and members of the House and Senate who twitter on and on about this tarnished object against the backdrop of dead, dying, bloodied and starving children left in the wake of Trump’s cruel and immoral campaign of revenge for every slight that ever pierced his pathetically thin skin.
It is insulting to watch the chuckling roundtables of hosts and guests trying to score political or ratings points.
50,000 children in Gaza have been killed or maimed by American weapons, authorized by the pompous fool who would sign any executive order placed before him. He loves his signature more than he has ever loved another human. The carnage continues because of his indifference and vanity.
2,500 Ukrainian children have been blown to bits by Putin’s attacks because, in part, Trump is unwilling to restrain a strongman he so deeply admires.
Because of Donald Trump’s complete capitulation to the cruelest mob of right-wing zealots, millions of low income Americans will lose basic health care. Thousands will die from preventable illnesses, many alone and without comfort.
A Lancet report estimates that 14 million lives will be lost as a result of cuts to USAID funding, 4.5 million children under the age of five among them. Rather than reading this as an abstraction, picture children, tender and vulnerable as your own, crying themselves to death because truckloads of food were destroyed to make a political point.
How many small children will contract measles or other preventable diseases because Trump has empowered a mentally-ill conspiracy theorist who is dismantling an infrastructure of science and good practice that has protected children for generations?
The number of adults killed, maimed, starving and left to die by dint of American action or inaction is many multiples of the small corpses left in Trump’s wake. I don’t mean to sanitize this grotesque reality, but it is the children’s faces that break my heart.
I have three grandchildren and would do anything in my power to save them from pain. I cannot look at pictures of children starving in Gaza or hungry in American cities and towns without my mind’s eye briefly superimposing my own grandchildren on the image.
It is a natural defense response to blink away such images, but it is rational and necessary to take away the understanding that each child - each of 50,000 in Gaza, each of 2,500 in Ukraine, each of 14 million around the world - was loved as much as your own. And to know that we are all indirectly complicit should haunt every human with a conscience.
Every person with political power, every influential person in the media, should rage against this wanton inhumanity, not sit and chitchat about the Epstein Files.
I had the privilege of brief acquaintance of the late poet and storyteller Grace Paley. Her poem, Responsibility, is timeless and urgent. We must all cry out like Cassandra before it’s too late.
It is the responsibility of society to let the poet be a poet
It is the responsibility of the poet to be a woman
It is the responsibility of the poet to stand on street corners
giving out poems and beautifully written leaflets
also leaflets they can hardly bear to look at
because of the screaming rhetoric
It is the responsibility of the poet to be lazy to hang out and
prophesy
It is the responsibility of the poet not to pay war taxes
It is the responsibility of the poet to go in and out of ivory
towers and two-room apartments on Avenue C
and buckwheat fields and army camps
It is the responsibility of the male poet to be a woman
It is the responsibility of the female poet to be a woman
It is the poet’s responsibility to speak truth to power as the
Quakers say
It is the poet’s responsibility to learn the truth from the
powerless
It is the responsibility of the poet to say many times: there is no
freedom without justice and this means economic
justice and love justice
It is the responsibility of the poet to sing this in all the original
and traditional tunes of singing and telling poems
It is the responsibility of the poet to listen to gossip and pass it
on in the way storytellers decant the story of life
There is no freedom without fear and bravery there is no
freedom unless
earth and air and water continue and children
also continue
It is the responsibility of the poet to be a woman to keep an eye on
this world and cry out like Cassandra, but be
listened to this time