Life has not always been easy for us, maybe its never really easy. However, we have never watched while our children dwindled from lack of nutritious food. We have never taken turns sleeping in order to protect what food and necessities we had. And, we know enough about history, and the broader world, to be extremely grateful to have raised our children in an environment of unusual safety and abundance.
We have friends and acquaintances who have never known material comforts to the same extreme. And now, what little material comfort they had known is vanishing, or has vanished, as the world scrambles to deal with the pandemic. Jobs have been lost in parts of the world where there is no unemployment or federal stimulus checks. Crops are sometimes out of reach because of travel restrictions. Supply lines are disrupted and, most troubling, assistance from friends in the United States is in danger of waning.
You see, contrary to popular myth, the people of the United States of America are very generous and many people in the majority world have benefited greatly from that generosity.
It is not foreign government assistance or USA Rice that the people we speak with are concerned about losing, those always have strings attached and often serve the bullies and warlords more than the folks. Its the food, medicine, water wells, and a hundred other acts of love personally delivered by visiting Americans, eager to share their blessing with others. Shared blessings which have no strings, no sense of superiority, no propping up of preferred regimes, only a desire to love.
We’ve been privileged to see much of that love first hand and privileged to know many of those unheralded American lovers.
But now, America is in jeopardy, and those in the majority world know it, and are unsettled by it. They know there is no other country that generates so many individual people who give so much to love their far-away neighbors.
So America, we need to find our way through this, not just for our sake and that of our children, but also for the 265 million people who are expected to be pushed into food insecurity due to the world pandemic response. American lovers, let’s get to it.