Last week was an eventful week for my family. The week began for us at a Moral Monday press conference on Sept. 29 outside of GOP Sen. Mitch McConnell’s office in Louisville, Kentucky. We were there as mourners, accompanied by two symbolic caskets, to grieve the Big Beautiful Bill that is projected to kill tens of thousands of poor people annually through its brutal budget cuts to Medicaid and SNAP benefits. With the support of McConnell, the Senate passed the cuts in July. We were there to call on McConnell and other leaders to restore the health care and nutritional funding people in our communities need to survive.
The next day, as the government prepared to shut down, my family packed our bags to leave town for my daughter Naomi’s spinal surgery. On Oct. 2, with the shutdown in full swing, we were settled into the Ronald McDonald House at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital with a community of families who were there fighting for their own children’s health and survival.
Of the many things my kids inherited from me, one is a rare bone disease that creates rounded bone spurs throughout our bodies. The disease usually means that our bodies make an uncomfortable home to live in, but sometimes the disease turns the pain thermostat up from discomfort to agony.
My daughter’s superpower has always been the ability to pull sunshine into whatever space she inhabits. But beginning in February, the severity of her pain darkened her mental sky. Conversations changed from the whimsical to wondering about the point of living a life haunted by chronic pain. An MRI revealed that a bone spur had developed in her spinal column creating a spinal compression in the C4 vertebrate capable of radiating pain throughout her body, making surgery necessary to mitigate the pain and protect her spinal cord.
That is a lot of details. But details matter; they are what nearly all families staying under Ronald McDonald roofs across the country are trying to juggle, whether they are rich or poor — or Democrat or Republican.
The magical news is that, a few days after her surgery, my daughter felt better. Sure, she walked like a drunken sailor — but the truth is that our entire house feels lighter. But here is the thing: Like many other children, Naomi needs to go back because another surgery awaits. And with so much health care for children on the budgetary chopping block, it is not at all clear which of our kids will be lucky enough to continue their journey of healing and receive the treatments their conditions require.
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With the shutdown in its second week, I’m haunted by the faces of the children and families I saw in Cincinnati. They turn the clinical statistics of the budget into human stories. The truth of where we are as a nation can feel unbearable. Again, details matter. With nearly $1 trillion in cuts to benefits for poor people, lives are at stake. The best projections estimate that over 10 million families stand to lose Medicaid benefits. Nearly 10 million also stand to lose some portion of SNAP benefits that protect families from malnutrition — and children are one of the most impacted demographics. America has a long history of screwing the poor and the marginalized, but never before have so many poor folks stood to lose so much.
However, if poor parents have reason to mourn, rich families have cause to celebrate. The top 99.8% of the wealthiest families in America stand to receive many more millions of untaxed dollars because of an increase in the estate tax exemption. The children of the wealthiest families now have a $30 million buffer between them and any financial responsibility to the country that created their wealth. Of course, this says nothing of the money that continues to flow to oil companies, war profiteers and private companies producing for-profit prisons. The bank accounts of social depravity have never been fatter.
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I know of no living document more reflective of a nation’s morality than its budget. As Jesus said, “Where your money is, there will your heart be also.” And since there is no better measuring stick of a people’s spiritual strength than how we treat the least of these, how we care for children who are sick and poor says everything we need to know about our nation’s soul. And it causes me to tremble.
It’s unclear if our elected representatives will find the moral courage needed for their constituents to survive. Heavy questions hang in the air at Ronald McDonald Houses across our nation, but some things are not in question.
Families like mine know we do not have the luxury to despair. We will continue to fight for our children, and for their friends and classmates. We will fight now and in the future. Not because we are heroes, but because we are parents — and it is in our nature that in the needs of our children, we find the courage our world so desperately needs.
