U.S. saved millions of lives, didn't bother to tell anyone
It was Canada Day and Canadians were respectful during Star Spangled Banner
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During World War II, the United States saved the world.
It's a glorious part of American history and perhaps the last time Americans agreed on the reasons to take up arms.
After the war, with Europe in ruins, the United States did something extraordinary. Through the Marshall Plan, it rebuilt Europe.
Our generosity has continued ever since.
But this year President Trump decided America First.
Why should we help other peoples in need when so many of our own citizens are struggling is a difficult argument to refute? It has been asked for years.
The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) was gutted over the past six months and will soon be shuttered.
Most of us have forgotten about it already.
But last week, William Herkewitz, the former head of communications for USAID, reminded us that the United States has been performing humanitarian miracles annually for decades with an essay in the New York Times.
Because we are a superpower,
Because we are the richest people in the world.
Because we are a people with a heart and soul.
Herkewitz sums up President Trump's executive order as "America will abandon the fight against global famine."
So the question then becomes: "Why?"
Why should be help third-world countries?
Why should we save the lives of people we don't know.
Maybe, because we can.
We are the cavalry.
We are the last beacon of hope for those that are starving.
As a USAID official, Herkewitz served in East Africa on the front lines during a three-year drought.
He writes that 40 million people - about eight New York Cities - were helped by humanitarian aid and cited experts who believed between 2.1 and 3.9 million people would have died without that help. That's the populations of Chicago and Philadelphia combined. And half of those deaths would have been children and babies.
Yet, that heroic effort never registered with Americans.
When the drought ended in 2023, USAID backed away from what Herkewitz described as "one of the most successful humanitarian responses in modern history."
USAID concentrated its message on Congress, not the American people.
"We didn't even attempt a victory lap," Herkewitz wrote. "There was no presidential address. No plaque in Washington. Not even a full public report."
USAID hosted 35 congressional delegations in Kenya alone in 2024. Members of Congress and their staffs met USAID staff members, received private briefings and toured life-saving projects. Herkewitz said they often left praising the effort. But no one came to rescue their critical work.
That has left Herkewitz and his colleagues bitter.
"The people who know exactly what we're losing are the ones letting it happen," Herkewitz wrote. "They know that when the next drought happens, America won't be able to replicate our successes."
Hell, after passing the the spending bill last week, they don't even want to help poor Americans.
It leaves us all having to look at what we believe about our own humanity and whether we are willing to help.
We already know Congress has not heart or soul.
The question Herkewitz asks is simple: Is America willing to show up when people are dying?
The cuts overseas make that answer clear.
Oh, Canada
I woke up in Ontario on Tuesday to "Happy Canda Day" wishes.
When I was planning my visit to Toronto to see the Yankees play the Blue Jays, I was total oblivious to Canada's national holiday.
So there in a sold out Rogers Centre with the roof open on a glorious summer day, I wondered what type of response the Star Spangled Banner would get. After all, Canadian patriotism was running rampant as a foul-line to foul-line maple leaf flag was stretched across the outfield.
But as the Star Spangled Banner unfolded, the Canadians were respectful. There was no sign of the political animosity that Donald Trump has unleashed between our two countries.
Then came "Oh Canada."
I admit, I have a soft spot for the Canadian national anthem. I've heard it a lot at hockey games in Glens Falls and I often say it is the world's best national anthem.
As the singer began:
"Oh, Canada!
Our home and native land!
True patriot love in all of us command.
And all around us, proud Canadians joined in softly at first, then louder as the song continued until the final "Oh, Canada, we stand on guard for thee."
I happily joined in.
Show is cast
Adirondack Theater Festival announced the cast for The Last American Newspaper this week.
Doug MacKechnie, a Chicago actor, will be playing me. Those are words I never anticipated writing. And even though I put a copy of the book personally into the hands of George Clooney, we never heard from him.
Nicholas Baroudi, a Queensbury guy and ATF veteran who was in Dial M for Murder last year, will be playing another Queensbury guy, Mark Mahoney.
Craig Wallace, who has appeared in shows across the country, will be playing Will Doolittle.
David Girard, a Saratoga actor who teaches at Siena College and University at Albany, will be playing Don Lehman.
Lise Bruneau, another veteran actor, will be playing City Editor Mary Joseph. I named the city editor in honor of Mary Joseph, a Glens Falls woman who was our assistant features editor at The Post-Star before dying of skin cancer at the age of 39. But Bob Condon, our real city editor for 25 years, was the real inspiration.
Elizabeth Pietrangelo, who was in Mystic Pizza at ATF and has performed in the Lake George Dinner Theatre, will be playing reporter Lydia Moore and is a conglomerate of many of our reporters at The Post-Star but was inspired by current Times Union reporter Kathleen Moore and former Post-Star reporter Lydia Wheeler.
Big Ugly
Besides costing thousands their healthcare in the North Country, the Big Ugly Bill will be a setback to battling climate change.
It will slash tax breaks for wind and solar power and those deals on electric cars will soon be a thing of the past.
Meanwhile, scientists continue to warn that temperatures are rising faster each year leading to deadly wildfires, crop failures and floods.
Analysts also believe that ending the tax credits for solar and wind will lead to increases in electricity prices.
What we stand for
Substack columnist and historian, Heather Cox Richardson, wrote this on the Fourth of July:
But just as in the 1850s, we are now, once again, facing a rebellion against our founding principle as a few people seek to reshape America into a nation in which certain people are better than others.
The men who signed the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776, pledged their “Lives, [their] Fortunes and [their] sacred Honor” to defend the idea of human equality. Ever since then, Americans have sacrificed their own fortunes, honor, and even their lives, for that principle.
EPA employees
Last week, I wrote about employees at the Environmental Protection Agency who had signed a letter criticizing the administration for politicizing environmental policies.
On Thursday, 144 employees who had signed the letter were put on administrative leave.
The action compromised the employees First Amendment rights to free speech.
A union representative of the 8,000 EPA workers said that the move was "clearly an act of retaliation" and the union would move to protect the workers.
In recent weeks, President Trump has described coal as "beautiful" and "clean" when it is actually the dirtiest of the fossil fuels and a significant source of greenhouse gases.
Bulwark growth
The Bulwark is a conservative "never Trump" news website that was founded with the help of conservatives Bill Kristol and Charlie Sykes.
It recently crossed the 100,000 paid subscriber mark while also boating 830,000 total subscribers to rank second on Substack's leaderboard.
There are alternatives for conservatives if they want to get factual information beyond Fox News.
Ken Tingley spent more than four decades working in small community newspapers in upstate New York. Since retirement in 2020 he has written three books and is currently adapting his second book "The Last American Newspaper" into a play. He currently lives in Queensbury, N.Y.
USAID is dead. The plug was pulled on Canada Day.
My son worked for USAID and July 1st was the last day he was paid, although he was “fired” in February, locked out of his office, and denied access to his work email and computer access.
USAID was never simply a charity. It served the interests of the USA in various ways. Preventing famine has benefits of stemming migration, developing goodwill among networks of people and officials around the world who can be helpful in numerous ways including on the ground intelligence, analyzing natural assets in various areas including agricultural and mineral potential that can be useful for American companies eager to establish trade relationships, and direct purchase of American agricultural products to be distributed to starving people.
The last was often contentious among development experts, since many believed it would in the long term be more useful to spend the actual dollars in the local economies to encourage local agricultural production. Other criticisms included more overt attempts to use USAID as an instrument of policy rather than as a soft power agency, the size of its bureaucracy, and reliance on NGOs and contractors.
Maybe people are staring to understand that bureaucracies are put in place to prevent fraud, to provide oversight to projects so that funding provided by taxpayers is used in the way it is intended.
When you drain the swamp beware a flood.
There are more answers to the question “why help people in other countries?” A big one is that reducing hunger and illness relieves stresses that lead to conflict, both within and between countries. Conflict leads to instability, political unrest, violence — it may start small, but often spills over into neighboring regions, driving emigration, chaos and misery… All this may seem remote to many Americans, but even distant conflicts add pressure to international relations, which inevitably affects us in various ways.
American aid is also a potent form of “soft power,” raising the stature of the US, and diminishing opportunities for Russia and China to exploit vulnerabilities in those countries.
It was a terrible mistake to let all our good works overseas go unrecognized and uncelebrated by the public! It once was, and could have continued to be, a source of great national pride. And the cost of USAID was so low, especially compared with the enormous benefits, that its destruction is a great tragedy!