MONDAY: Nicholas Kristof has published a column...

MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 22, 2025

...from a forgotten world: We're so old that we can remember when, from the Blue American perspective, the peculiar behavior of Elon Musk seemed to be worth complaining about.

In part, we refer to his dismantling of USAID and to the effects of that conduct. Quixotically, Nicholas Kristof returned to that topic in yesterday's New York Times.

We call Kristof's conduct "quixotic" due to a basic fact. As of Wednesday, September 10, little matters in this nation's Red/Blue Civil War other than the reactions of various individual players to the murder of Charlie Kirk.

Round the decay of [our nation's] colossal Wreck, little beside remains! In yesterday's Sunday Opinion section, Kristof proceeded with a column from Uganda all the same.

It's likely that material of this type never mattered all that much within the American political context. That said, we were struck by how thoroughly dated the excerpt presented below now seems.

Below, you see part of yesterday's column. We were struck by the total irrelevance which now accrues to this type of concern:

Trump’s Most Lethal Policy

The Trump administration has claimed that no one has died because of its cuts to humanitarian aid, and it is now trying to cancel an additional $4.9 billion in aid that Congress already approved. Yet what I find here in desperate villages in southwestern Uganda is that not only are aid cuts killing children every day, but that the death toll is accelerating.

[...]

Let me introduce [President] Trump to the mothers of children that his cost-cutting has killed.

Valentine Tusifu, a 36-year-old refugee from the Democratic Republic of Congo, is mourning her 10-year-old daughter, Jibia. The girl excelled in school here in Rwamwanja, ranking third out of 58 students in her fourth-grade class, and dreamed of becoming a nurse.

But the family had to pull Jibia out of school in May when the loss of American funding led to a mass firing of teachers. Jibia cried inconsolably, her mother recalled, as the girl became an elementary school dropout.

Then it got worse. The family’s mosquito nets developed holes, but with aid cuts, the health center had run out of new nets, so Jibia slept unprotected. She contracted malaria. Normally, a village health worker would have handed out an inexpensive medicine, but that system disintegrated along with aid budgets, and so did the supply of anti-malaria medication.

So Jibia’s mom took the girl, feverish and vomiting, to the local health center, but it, too, had run out of necessary medicines. Doctors say they tried to rush the girl to a regional hospital. But ambulances were unavailable because drivers had been laid off as a result of cuts in U.S. assistance.

By the time Jibia arrived at the hospital, the malaria had destroyed her red blood cells, leaving her urine dark with their residue, medical records show. A person normally has a hemoglobin level above 10; Jibia’s stood at just 2.9. So she desperately needed a blood transfusion, but Uganda’s blood transfusion program relied on American support and is now struggling. A transfusion was unavailable.

So Jibia died on July 7.

“It was aid cuts,” her mom told me—without bitterness or any sense of entitlement, simply stating a fact that is obvious on the ground here. “People are dying every day and night.”

So it went. First, the cuts took away the mosquito nets. Then, the cuts took away the inexpensive anti-malarial medicine.

When Jibia needed transportation to a regional hospital, ambulances were no longer available. Eventually, she needed a transfusion, but that too was unavailable due to the cuts in aid.

For those reasons, Jibia died. She was the girl who had cried because she was losing the chance to become a nurse, due to the way the spending cuts has led to the firing of teachers.

Kristof's column is quite lengthy; it touches on various topics. That includes the claim that these deaths have resulted from spending cuts which have actually saved the United States zero money. It also touches on the possible effect this sort of thing might have on this nation's global "soft power."

It's a lengthy column. We were struck by its dated feel. 

A few months ago, it still seemed that (hundreds of thousands of such) deaths might function as part of the American political discourse. Those days are long, long gone. Kristof's column seems to come from an earlier century, not from a time, just a few months ago, when an apparent nutcase like Elon Musk was rampaging through the federal government with his band of merry men.

Should the United States be providing the financial aid which might have kept this girl in school and might even have kept her alive? In the end, there is no ultimate answer to that sort of question.

As of yesterday, it seemed almost quaint to see the Times present this lengthy column. We've moved a very long way, baby, since the days when Musk was rampaging through the pea-patch with his gang of incompetent men.

The onset of our American civil war has been remarkably rapid. By now, it's all about who may have said what about the murder of Kirk and the tribe to which tribe they belong. 

Is there a way to recover from the tribal divide which is now so stark? It's hard for us to believe that there is. As we'll be (quixotically) noting all week, the need for healing is vast.