My pledge: I’m not going to let this shit get me down anymore.

They’ve come up with a name for it now: doomscrolling, which Google’s “AI Overview” tells us is defined as “the act of excessively and persistently consuming negative news online.” How they kept the word “obsessively” out of that line sets a new world record for understatement, or maybe AI Overview is just trying to reduce the incidence of depression among liberals – take your pick.

In any case, you don’t even have to scroll for doom and gloom anymore. It just pops right up in your email newsfeed, as this headline from The Bulwark did in mine this morning: “The Boy Genius Who Killed 14 Million Poor People.” The story, by the excellent Jonathan V. Last, is about one of Musk’s DOGE-oids who was a principal actor in shutting down USAID way back in February and March. All the usual doom-factors are there – the shocking statistic of millions who may die, the heartless little shithead who caused it all, the distracted and possibly corrupt mainstream media that has more or less ignored the implications of the gigantic chunk of doom that is before us, and as usual, being cared about by liberals and few others.

I’m not going to get into nitpicking the doom-levels involved; the story quotes one expert who says “300,000 have already died,” and Last himself takes that figure and speculates it might be high and “only” as many as 50,000 to 100,000 deaths to point out, appropriately, that any number of deaths due to Trump’s slashing and burning of USAID would be too many.

I don’t want to pick on JVL, as he sometimes calls himself. He’s a good guy and a canny observer of the twisted globule of steaming excrement the right wing of the Republican Party has become, and he is perfectly right to use the example of USAID to illustrate the callous indifference of the Republicans to the consequences of their actions. Other examples abound, of course – cut NOAA and it’s bound to affect the weather forecasting that might have helped the Texas Hill Country before the flash flooding of the Guadalupe River; do the same to the FAA, and look at the number of near misses and near-shutdowns of airports like Newark that we’ve gone through, not to mention the tragic loss of life in the midair collision near Washington National Airport that took 67 lives just days after Trump had taken office and begun issuing his slash-and-burn executive orders.

It's always a good idea to record the crimes of the band of criminally indifferent assholes who currently occupy the Executive Branch of our government. I believe we can all agree that the U.S. Agency for International Development should not have been shut down. They did a huge amount of good work in feeding people and providing badly needed health care in distressed and war-torn areas. The work of PEPFAR alone – begun by Republican President George W. Bush, incidentally – has saved more than 25 million people who without it would have probably died from HIV/AIDS.

What I would like to do is present you with a different way of viewing the doom as you scroll through it, and the USAID story works perfectly. Think of Afghanistan as an example. We fought that war, if it could be called that, for 20 years. The United States military lost 2,459 people killed during that time, with 20,769 wounded in action. But we shouldn’t think of Afghanistan purely as a war, because we did a whole lot of what might be described as good works while we were there, with USAID being responsible for a considerable portion of it.

Water wells were drilled; places that had never had access to clean water benefitted from what we did. Schools were established to educate children. Girls who had been denied an education beyond grade school could attend high school and college. Women were helped to establish businesses. Roads were paved. Electricity was established in places it had never been. Health care was improved everywhere, especially in rural areas, which in Afghanistan are very rural and often nearly inaccessible.

The main accomplishment of our 20 years of aid to Afghanistan was how women benefitted. They had rights where before they had none.

And then, because we left, women had no rights again. It was a country whose people had begun to live in the 21^st Century, and we condemned the neediest of them, women and children, to lives of want and despair.

Sound familiar? As a nation, we effectively did to Afghanistan what Trump did to USAID. We shut it down.

Now, you could say that Trump and the Republican Party had a choice. They could have continued with USAID as it was before, or even in a somewhat diminished state so “savings” could be had. But we had a choice in Afghanistan as well. We could have kept our military in that country. NGOs would have been able to continue their work on healthcare and food programs. Schools for girls and women would have been kept open. Women would have had opportunities to run businesses and live independent lives. At least in Kabul, they would have. But in the rest of the country, where the Taliban had effective if unacknowledged control, women’s lives would still have been constrained by tradition and the strictures of the Muslim religion. Afghanistan’s government would have been in name only. It would have been the Taliban collecting and administering the use of taxes everywhere but Kabul and a few other large population centers, and maybe not even there.

We would have continued to spend tens of billions of dollars a year so that a tiny portion of Afghanistan could be dragged out of the 15^th Century and marginally into the 21^st. And crucially, our soldiers would have continued to pay a huge price. They would be killed and wounded so that we could pat ourselves on the back for what we were doing for the oppressed and the poor and the sick.

But how long could we have gone on administering such a country? How long could we have ensured that the schools opened in the mornings to welcome girls as well as boys? How long could we have continued to pay the heavy price in blood and treasure that our good works were costing not only the U.S. taxpayers, but the soldiers who risked their lives so that women and children and the poor in a land far away could benefit?

The analogy between USAID and Afghanistan is not a perfect one. We weren’t sacrificing the lives of soldiers so that food could be delivered and HIV/AIDS sufferers could be treated in Sub-Saharan Africa and elsewhere. USAID was not costing anywhere near what we spent propping up Afghanistan and keeping the Taliban at bay. It is true that our presence in Afghanistan was supported by both Democratic and Republican administrations, just as USAID was supported in a bipartisan manner since the 1960’s. But it’s also true that the funding for what we called the “war” in Afghanistan went up and down based on political considerations and who was in power in the White House and Congress. So did the funding for USAID bend with the political winds.

It is also true that elections have consequences, and the last one has had the consequence of our retreat from our previous stature in a leadership role in foreign affairs and humanitarian aid around the world. It could thus be said that the poor and the sick around the world are paying for the votes that were cast by our fellow citizens who chose to elect Donald Trump rather than Kamala Harris as our president, and a Republican Congress rather than a Democratic one. If 14 million are indeed in danger of dying because Donald Trump decided to defund and cancel USAID, the lives of 21 million women in Afghanistan are surely being negatively affected by our departure from that country, and we have no idea how many Afghans may die because we no longer protect the NGOs that were providing food aid, access to clean water, and adequate health care to that beleaguered nation.

I am not saying that we should not lament the wrongs that are being committed in Washington D.C. by Trump’s criminally negligent, indifferent, and aggressively wrongheaded administration. But we could help ourselves by looking at some of what we did in the past, and what is being done in our names today, with clear eyes. At least some of the doom that has befallen our beleaguered nation was, effectively speaking at least, inevitable. When there is no way to “win” a war like the one we fought in Afghanistan, then the war must end, and along with it some if not all of the good that was done because we were there.

USAID did not have to end, and history will record the consequences of Donald Trump’s callous disregard of those we helped with our tax dollars in the before times, whose lives may now end.

Rather than doomscrolling, what we should be doing is committing ourselves to a better future for ourselves and others here in this country and around the world. Democrats will be running for Congress in the election next year. We should work to elect them in large enough numbers that we can stymie the doom that Donald Trump wants to lower upon this land.

I, for one, am not going to let bad news consume me and drive me to despair. I am going to look at what is going on in this country and around the world, and I’m going to see it and write about it as clearly as I can. I’m going to keep my chin up and my eyes on the prize as those we look up to have done before us. We know who are the heroes are, and by God, they are ours, and we should model ourselves on them. They didn’t get depressed and allow bad news to consume them. They took to the streets and demanded change, as we should.

To the barricades! That is where I’m going to be. You will be able to read about it on your phone, but so help me God, what I write will not be doom and gloom. I will cover the present by keeping in mind our past to ensure we have a future for ourselves and our children. That is my commitment.