Evildoers

Winslow Homer, Sunset Fires, 1880

I was raised in the evangelical church, and something that my parents and their church stressed was the need to care for others, that one of the most important virtues was to care for the poor as Jesus did.

So I became an aid worker, first working for a small nonprofit overseas, and then working for the US government. I worked with farmers struggling to grow enough crops to keep their children fed and in school, and doctors taking care of the dying with limited equipment, and volunteers trying to make sure sick newborns were taken care of. And the whole time, though I left evangelicalism, I carried with me the words of Christ:

‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you? When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?’

The King will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’

(Matthew 25:37-40 NIV)

About a month ago, one of the first actions of the new US administration was to try and completely abolish my agency. One Monday morning, we thought we could work as usual, and by Monday afternoon, we were prepared to be gone tomorrow. They left tens of thousands of Americans and international workers without jobs. They abandoned thousands of people mid-clinical trials, leaving them with experimental devices and drugs in their bodies. They have likely left millions of people without food, vaccines, and lifesaving medicines.

They seemed to think it was funny.

There has been nothing in my life that has made me understand the Old Testament so much as the past month. The Bible verse I have repeated to myself over and over again — like Job, like King David — is “why do the wicked prosper”?

How long, O Lord?

Good and reasonable people can disagree on the size of the government, amounts of foreign aid, levels of immigration, and so on. You can’t work effectively in foreign aid without making common cause with people very different from you, who have beliefs that you deeply disagree with. I have worked to end poverty and disease with many, many men who think that I am lesser because I am a woman, because you cannot work to end poverty in this world without such allies, and because I do not want to make the same mistake as them.

Good and reasonable people do not delight in traumatizing other humans, do not make memes of suffering, do not call good evil and evil good. It’s usually easy for me to see the humanity in people, so congratulations to them, I guess, for so delighting in evil that it eclipses their souls. I said a prayer for their souls but I wondered if it was more for my own.

I hold out hope, though, that most of my countrymen are not evildoers, that they did not know what they voted for.

I hold out hope that if they saw a starving child in Sudan they would give him something to eat, if they saw a thirsty woman on the side of the road in India they would give her something to drink, if they saw a man sick with malaria or HIV they would give him medicine and look after him.

I hold out hope that in the world closer to theirs, that they hold sympathy for the veterans who have been cruelly and illegally fired after work hours, for hard-working people who have been cheated and lied to, for the fathers who can no longer afford healthcare for their families.

There is still time.

Read next: On the Dignity of Generosity