Joe Gannon: Like chickens coming home to roost

I appreciated Rutherford J. Platt’s Feb. 24 column on evil as called out by Rep. Jim McGovern [“Applause for calling out ‘evil’”]. The evil cited was “America’s role as a responsible world power is being diminished: Foreign aid has been thrown into chaos, endangering lives worldwide.”

And that is true. But lest we forget, evil also can be defined as invading and destroying two countries as with the U.S. killing of hundreds of thousands of civilians in Afghanistan and Iraq. USAID, so recently canned by Elon Musk and his so-called DOGE, was always a tool of American foreign interests, aimed at helping American companies and the American economy, and to help squash leftist parties in recipient countries. For more of USAID’s history see The Nation article ”USAID Is Not Worth Blindly Defending” (thenation.com/article/politics/usaid-trump-musk-history-controversies/).

My concern is that while Donald Trump’s plans to destroy this country are our primary fear, we might forget that evil has been done by this country for decades, if not centuries. So, in one important sense we Americans can be appalled by Trump’s wrecking ball, but we cannot feel like we are innocents being mugged by a tyrant.

Given our history, our current crisis could look a lot like the chickens coming home to roost.

Joe Gannon

Easthampton