So, during the shutdown, these very Christian programs are at the bottom of the White American Christian totem pole:
Some of the agency’s offices to be hit hardest by the closure include the office of Food and Nutrition Services that oversees the Child Nutrition, Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), and the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC). By the end of the fifth day of the shutdown, staffing will be cut by 95%.
No outcry about this, of course, from the heaven-bound white Christians who voted for Trump.
The meanness does not stop there. The descendants of those who lost land and much, much more to those who believed they were blessed by the great white Christian god, are now learning, in their impoverished state, that “the Food Distribution Program on Indian Reservations will only be operational based on available resources [during the shutdown].” Trump threatens to keep this government shutdown until he gets money for what is only a monument to white racism and its incredible-seeming powers. The wall will amount to nothing more than a pyramid to that racism. A monument for its pale phantom pharaohs.
And so, here is the thing—and I hate it that the left always has to state the obvious, the rational, the plain facts of the matter—the president claims the wall is about safety, protecting US lives, but that is nonsense in its most perfect condition. It takes only a few seconds of casual reflection to conceptually disintegrate its logic. Guns, for example, are now killing more children than cars accidents (and cancer). And absolutely nothing is being done about guns. This is just one example of the absurdity of the shutdown (which has its point of origin in the absurdity of white Christian American racism—the dominant religion in the US).
“The message around firearm injury is we haven’t invested at all. As a country, we’ve invested really not at all in firearm-related research, in doing any of the public health and injury prevention science we know could contribute to a decrease,” [said Dr. Rebecca Cunningham of the University of Michigan Injury Prevention Center].
The chances of a US child (white or either wise) being killed by a “bad hombre” are extremely small, but this mostly imaginary villain has shutdown a massive government, not the absence of even what most US citizens consider to be common sense gun laws. So, the whole wall is obviously not about safety. It’s about racism. US racism. This is all Trump has. The corner he backed into. He is digging his heels into it. Protecting imaginary white purity from an imaginary brown swamping.
Because media has already forgotten about the Thousand Oaks shooting, let me remind you it happened not too long. And one of its survivors survived a mass shooting that happened in Las Vegas and injured over 400 people and killed 58. The lungs of many of the injured will never ever draw air easily. But we never stop hearing about the wall. The president and his white Christian followers (those godless believers) have nothing to say about how “the heartbreaking psychological effects school lockdowns left on 4 million children last year.” No. It’s brown children who are the problem, who are thrown into cages, who are in concentration camps, who are dying in the hands of Homeland Security.
