What a month it’s been for me personally and in our close-knit communities. Trying to cope with the loss of loved ones has been extremely difficult and downright demanding. Yet having to come to terms with the fact that these losses were murders due possibly to mental health issues has been even more devastating and frustrating to say the least. Of course, everyone has their own opinion about the topic of mental illness, including the current leadership in our country who is cutting back on mental health services. After all, it’s about killing them with kindness right?

I find it sort of ironic that on Valentine’s Day, President Trump signed the Executive Order establishing the lovely Make America Healthy Again Commission. His goal is to help children make better choices to get healthy and stay healthy because six out of ten Americans have at least one chronic disease and four of ten have two or more chronic diseases. Plus an estimated one in five U.S. adults suffers from some sort of mental illness. To which I understand completely because I suffer from diabetes like my father did and his father did before him, even though I was never overweight from my childhood into my late thirties. In fact, I was quite fit in my twenties and thirties, and then started declining in my forties. Though I know my diabetes stems from my father’s side, I also know that I had kept a diagnosis of the disease off my health chart for 50 years or until we were told that it was “mandatory” to get the COVID-19 vaccines which made many of us, extremely sick for months, but it was for our own good.

However, now I suffer from long term COVID symptoms and I’ve been diagnosed with autoimmune diseases that have left me exhausted, struggling with memory loss and migraines and having sleep problems. I now suffer from digestive issues, shortness of breath, and loss of smell and taste. COVID has also left me with anxiety that doesn’t go away, fibromyalgia that wrecks my body with unexplained pain and mast cell activation syndrome that causes allergy-like symptoms because these cells release too much of a substance causing crazy activation disorders. Yet now the White House has recently released its 2026 budget that includes steep cuts in our healthcare programs, particularly those housed in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Plus the President himself has made ill remarks towards those who suffer from disabilities. So I guess I’m just supposed to grin and bear it because those of us with disabilities are expendable and probably better off dead, right?

Then let’s talk about the freezes in grant funding, including those funding public health and education, especially the facilities that help the less fortunate and the chronically ill. Let’s do nothing as the administration threatens access to care for millions of Americans, especially our children, as it comes against affordable healthcare plans for those who will have to choose between food on their table or man’s medicine which kills us slowly but lines the pocket of the manufacturers and those prescribing it. Let’s cheer the President on as he withdraws the United States from the World Health Organization, cutting off U.S. funding for global health initiatives like disease eradication programs. After all, he’s going to “Make America Great Again” after he disposes of us guinea pigs which are a “burden” on society.

So let’s sit back and smile as they take away public broadcasting because it’s “Bias Media” and let’s watch him dismantle the Department of Education. Let’s cheer as he favors the wealthy, giving them tax cuts over the average Joe and sending to prison the poverty-stricken immigrant. After all, he’s all about the American people and is absolutely killing them with kindness.