To the Editor:
With plans to incapacitate the delivery and availability of health protections and services to the American people, President Donald Trump and Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert Kennedy Jr. now directly intervene to disrupt and cancel many of its most important features.
With guidance from the “triage” of Trump-Musk-Vance they’ll reduce and terminate safety inspections and standards for all medications, medical interventions and our foods. They’ll enfeeble the monitoring of infectious disease outbreaks and formerly cooperative endeavors with public health agencies throughout America. They want ongoing research to fall by the wayside and ignore anticipated new outbreaks and possible future pandemics.
Medicare and Medicaid will receive significantly diminished dollars from previously available and affordable public service medical programs.
Deeper into 2025 and beyond, these limits and terminations will directly impact millions of American lives, with many among us allowed to sicken and waste away. Some will perish quickly while others will last longer to endure excruciating pain without sympathy or relief of any kind. Then there is that segment of the U.S. population with means and wealth who’ll deliver their put-downs about the poor and related fraud claims, seen by the oligarchy as deserving their terrible fate.
Of course, there will be the cries of outrage from those hurt and abandoned by the cuts and service terminations, in what later may become described as “the great era of misfortune.”
It’s unlikely the recourse will result in actions like those of the Middle Ages where traitors to the crown of England were brought to capital punishment – hung, quartered and disemboweled. However, feelings of revenge may run as deep, wide and consequential, as those Trump has adopted to take revenge on those he views as his sworn enemies.
Yet reprisals will probably occur when those with alleged wrongs rise up in mass gatherings to collect from those who’ve brought wrack and ruin to them and their loved ones. After all, the Italian people derived some measure of satisfaction when they provided former dictator Benito Mussolini a noisy sendoff to his fate in 1945. Others of similar “fame” have met their perceived as deserved ends during the 20th century and before.
Meanwhile, what’s widely heard here already is the refrain, “We’re mad (as the dickens!) and not going to take it anymore,” along with cries of outrage in our streets and public gatherings of all kinds across America.
-Gene H. McIntyre, Keizer
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