DAVE REESE, 1 March 2025

Dave had wanted to go out, to be with friends. He had wanted to tell someone, maybe Jon, about his firing. About how he felt. But he was numb. There had been so much flooding his life these past two months and now it was like his mind was exploding.

Still, he couldn’t help himself, especially after that spat between Trump and Zelenskyy in front of open cameras. He thought it was for sure now, that America would leave Europe, and Nato – perhaps even help Russia directly, canceling sanctions.

Instead, he lived from bread and beer, and when he had no more beer he went to the local grocery store close by and bought some more. He hadn’t drunk this much in a long time. But at least he had been out today. He would deal with all the financial stuff, all the papers–everything he needed to do to survive himself, he would deal with that t… later.

Now he was all about who else was not going to survive. And so he trawled the net and news, hour after hour, compiling lists of all the evil the administration was perpetrating or had perpetrated already and seemingly gotten away with.

Then he found the story from The New Republic summing up how children would surely die because the USAID program with life-saving nutrition had been canceled overnight:

Now the Trump administration has officially terminated a number of current contracts struck by USAID for this lifesaving nutrition, contracts that had called for the paste to be delivered to hundreds of thousands of children, most in Africa, according to the Georgia-based nonprofit set to deliver them, Mana Nutrition.

It was a related program Dave had been working on at USAID before he was fired. Now it was news. Cold, clinical news.

And children would surely die. Children like his nephew, perhaps. And nobody gave a damn.

That’s when he had finally had enough beer.

Dave went to the small toilet in the small condo and threw up big time.

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