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Trump and Musk are destroying the world, but there’s a way we can counter this

Tim Costello

Elon Musk thinks empathy is the fundamental weakness of Western civilisation, and the gutting of USAid shows he means it. It’s the global poor who are already paying the staggering price – in sickness, starvation, and death – for the convictions of some of the world’s richest and most powerful people. As Easter rolls around, Tim Costello writes for The Age about why he’s tempted to despair – and yet convinced that the opposite of what Musk says is true.

Easter is supposed to be a season of hope and new life. This year, I find myself instead, like much of the world, in grief and perhaps even despair.

There’s personal financial anxiety, for starters, as a 70-year-old with superannuation watching the daily volatility of markets – trillions of dollars wiped away (even if some of that has been restored now). It’s possible we are on the precipice of recession and a global trade war, thanks to US President Donald Trump’s tariffs. But that’s not what tempts me to despair. There are a couple of other reasons for that.

First, it’s the complete destruction of USAid – the more than $40 billion withdrawn from the world’s poor. This is the program that supplied the drugs for HIV prevention and treatment; as a result, an estimated 1,192,400 people, many in Africa, will die this year who otherwise would not have. (That’s not a typo.) Over the next five years, another 10 million people will contract HIV.

Another half a million will die needlessly from the withdrawal of the USAid vaccine program, and nearly half a million others in the next year without American funding for food aid. After the earthquake in Myanmar, Trump said the US would help – but he has sacked all USAid workers in the country.

I have seen these things with my own eyes.

I was in Uganda and Kenya in February and saw despairing clinicians in slum clinics turn people away because the HIV, malaria and TB treatments had disappeared from the shelves thanks to the efforts of Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, in dismantling USAid. The irony would be comical were it not so grotesque.

The second source of my despair is the fact that evangelicals in the US, whose vote delivered Trump his victory, have been largely silent in the face of this death sentence for so many of the world’s poor. We are talking here about “pro-life” Republican evangelicals.

As I have written before, the fact that so many Christians support Trump has left me feeling like I have lost my tribe. It is hard for me to fathom how people of my faith could celebrate the harm being done to humanity.

I have been trying to remind US Christians of the contrast between Elon Musk, who said to podcaster Joe Rogan recently that the fundamental weakness of Western civilisation is empathy, and Jesus – who gave us the story of the Good Samaritan, and said blessed are the poor, and that when you feed and clothe the least of these, you do that to me. Who is right? Musk, a man worth more than $300 billion who reportedly gives nothing to the world’s poor, or Jesus?

As Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German theologian who was implicated in a plot to assassinate Hitler and executed by the Nazis just weeks before the end of World War II, put it: “Your yes to God requires your no to all injustice, to all evil, to all lies, to all oppression and violation of the weak and poor.”

I believe that Jesus’ message and person has so influenced Western civilisation that in fact the opposite of what Musk says is true: the fundamental strength of Western civilisation is empathy.

It’s true that it was US leadership following World War II, and the collective security it provided, that allowed Australia and other Western countries to invest in education, health, and foreign aid. This is what an alliance means. Now, defence budgets will rise across the board and that will inevitably mean less spending on health and education domestically, and on empathy for the world’s poor. Now, in place of the internationalism and rules-based order that has allowed us to make great inroads against global poverty and disease, we are all in a costly arms race as Trump assails his supposed allies with tariffs and defects from the goal of collective security in NATO and (likely) ANZUS. Now each nation feels vulnerable and alone. The winner in a poorer world is the arms industry, and the loser, as always, is the poor.

How can my grief not tip over into full-blown despair?

Easter reminds me of what is possible, even in the darkest of times.

After the crucifixion of an innocent good man, his followers in their grief were ready to give up, to give in to the black tunnel of despair. But their grief was turned instead to joy when on the third day, this Jesus – they claimed – rose from the dead. Despair was gone, and against all odds the movement they began shaped Western civilisation, infusing the culture with hope and a newfound empathy for the poor.

Despair is resignation and defeat, a darkness that cuts the nerve of acting. Ironically, despair as much as the callousness shown by Musk and Trump signals the death of empathy. Easter reminds me that grief can pass, however unlikely it may seem, however dark the tunnel we find ourselves in. The Easter story of the crucified and risen God-man insists that whenever we approach another human, regardless of ethnicity, capacity, or poverty, we are approaching something sacred – something of God. Despair is not the answer. Let us choose empathy instead, and keep choosing it.

 

 

Tim Costello is executive director of Micah Australia, a coalition of Christian development agencies, and a Senior Fellow at The Centre for Public Christianity. This article was first published in The Age.