My Brother's Keeper

 Perhaps the only thing that has partially redeemed the last few weeks of Trump administration madness is that Elon Musk, at least, seems to have slunk off the scene (at least for now). 

Despite being hailed variously as a "genius" and a "titan of industry," etc., all Musk seems to have accomplished during his few weeks in Washington is to kill starving children in Africa by withholding life-saving food aid; generate billions of dollars in excess legal costs for the U.S. taxpayer, due to litigation stemming from his unlawful terminations of various government agencies; torpedo the stock price of his own publicly-traded company by single-handedly toxifying its brand; and annoy everyone who ever had to sit in the same room with him for longer than five minutes. 

The fact, therefore, that Musk now seems to have tucked his tail between his legs and retreated back to Tesla is just about the best news we've had all year. Riddance was never better. 

The tragedy, though, is that the damage he was able to inflict, during his few weeks in Washington, will long outlast him. The New York Times reports that children facing famine in the Sudan—due to the country's ongoing civil war—literally starved to death in the wake of U.S. aid cuts. Multiple soup kitchens were forced to close their doors and turn people away hungry because the U.S. had suddenly and without warning cut off the flow of funds. People literally died as a result, because they could not put food in their bellies. 

So when Bill Gates said earlier this week that Elon Musk "killed children" with his aid cuts—he wasn't exaggerating. "The picture of the world’s richest man killing the world’s poorest children is not a pretty one," he added—and who could disagree? 

No doubt Musk and the rest of Trump's goons have resigned themselves to this much. They say: "not our problem." They say: "out of sight, out of mind." "If a few children starve to death in Africa, it's not our responsibility. They're all the way over there."

But there is a certain law of moral compensation in this world, that no man is so rich as to avoid. I won't call it justice or karma exactly. It is far too indiscriminate and blunt an instrument for that. But, beyond a certain point, you really do reap as you sow in this world. 

Our evidence for this claim comes once again from the New York Times. As the paper reports, Musk's aid cuts also set back disease outbreak prevention efforts in Africa, in the midst of a raging mpox outbreak and the emergence of a new hemorrhagic fever. Seriously. You may still recall the headlines from early on in the DOGE madness: just as Musk was cutting funds for the Ebola response, a new hemorrhagic fever was reported in Tanzania. Musk later claimed that the Ebola cuts were a mistake and the money had been restored—but, the damage was already done. 

As officials quoted in the Times piece note: the United States doesn't have the luxury of just saying disease outbreaks of these kinds are "someone else's problem." Observes one: "It’s actually in the interest of American people to keep diseases down" (woe to the country that needs to be reminded of something this obvious!). "Diseases make their way to the U.S. even when we have our best people on it, and now we are not putting our best people on it."

I'm reminded of what Thomas Carlyle wrote in Past and Present, on the subject of aid denials and disease outbreaks: 

 A poor Irish Widow, her husband having died in one of the Lanes of Edinburgh, went forth with her three children, bare of all resource, to solicit help from the Charitable Establishments of that City. At this Charitable Establishment and then at that she was refused;  referred from one to the other, helped by none;--till she had exhausted them all;  till her strength and heart failed her: she sank down in typhus-fever; died, and infected her Lane with fever, so that 'seventeen other persons' died of fever there in consequence. 

The humane Physician asks thereupon, as with a heart too full for speaking, Would it not have been _economy_ to help this poor Widow? She took typhus-fever, and killed seventeen of you!--Very curious.   

The forlorn Irish Widow applies to her fellow-creatures, as if saying, "Behold I am sinking, bare of help: ye must help me! I am your sister, bone of your bone;  one God made us:  ye must help me!" They answer, "No; impossible: thou art no sister of ours." But she proves her sisterhood; her typhus-fever kills _them:_  they actually were her brothers, though denying it! Had man ever to go lower for a proof?

History rhymes. Because today, the Trump officials are once again saying, like the "Charitable Establishments" of Edinburgh: "we have no responsibility to help you, even if you be starving! That's not our problem! We're not our brother's keeper!" 

And, almost as soon as they do so, the reports swirl: mpox is raging; in the absence of U.S. aid to help with disease containment, new hemorrhagic fevers are breaking out. The new diseases could well reach our shores. Suddenly, it very much is our problem. 

The people we wrote off—the people we dismissed as "someone else's problem" or "not my brother" have proved their brotherhood and sisterhood after all. We share the same bodies and the same vulnerabilities to disease. We are of one flesh indeed. 

"Had man ever to go lower for proof?"

Carlyle argues elsewhere in the same book that there is a kind of justice, a kind of divine compensation, in the universe. It's the same force we have described above: you reap as you sow. What goes around comes around. "There is justice here below," he wrote. "Forget that, thou hast forgotten all." We can see this justice—or, better, law of compensation—in the force of destiny that brings disease outbreaks to our shores from the very lands that we wrote off as "someone else's problem to deal with." 

Hugh MacDiarmid makes the same point, in his book-length epic poem about the Spanish Civil War: While nothing can "Cancel the wrong, bring back to life the slain," he wrote—"Yet in the perspectives that before me open / I know the evil will be undone and vengeance wrought / With a completeness beyond human thought." 

The same holds true for the Trump administration's crimes. No future justice or divine Providence can wipe out the wrong of what they have done. It cannot bring the starved children in the Sudan back to life. It cannot restore freedom and the compensation they are owed to the people Trump has locked away in an inhuman dungeon in El Salvador based on no charge or trial or conviction. It cannot undo any of these evils that Musk, Trump, Rubio, Bondi, Vance, Miller, and all their kindred creeps have wrought. 

But we know nonetheless that there will be a kind of moral compensation in the end. Every one of these creeps and cowards who have willingly starved children or locked people away in torturous foreign prisons will be held anathema and reprobated in the eyes of history. Every one of them will go down in the long night of ignominy among the ranks of history's other murderers and criminals. "We leave inhuman wrong to inhuman vengeance," then, as MacDiarmid said. 

But—he added—that does not mean our work is done. We still "have our part to play," he wrote—namely, in the present, to execrate them. To view them with nothing but the contempt that is owed to all cowards and traitors and bullies who pick on the weak and curry favor with despots. In short: to "deny" to them "any condonation, tolerance, or boon of intercourse," as MacDiarmid puts it, "Subject them in all connections to endless boycott [...] And hold them thus beyond the human pale / To meet the vengeance there that does not fail."