It’s only February, but I already have a proposal for word of the year: Betrayal.
This is the season of great betrayals. The evidence is everywhere. Much of this has its origins in Washington – or Mar-a-Lago, or wherever the unelected Elon Musk is currently sleeping as he works overtime to dismantle systems that have kept people alive, healthy, employed.
The United States, once the world’s largest benefactor, is now its great betrayer. For the people who have relied on the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), its destruction is a life-and-death matter. Consider the South African woman who showed up for her HIV medication and screening to find the Johannesburg clinic closed. Anyone with a brain understands what will become of her – thanks to decisions made by people apparently operating without hearts.
Now imagine being a participant in a clinical trial – and suddenly learning that it’s cancelled, even as you have a medical device still implanted in your body, or experimental drugs in your system. That is one frightening betrayal – with global health implications.
People working within the U.S. Department of Justice have found themselves not just vilified for doing their job, but out of a job altogether.
Workers have suddenly been fired from U.S. government employers, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Education Department and the Department of Veterans Affairs (and, in the case of a bunch of people working for the National Nuclear Safety Administration, rehired). Imagine their shock as they walk away from their jobs – carrying a box of stuff from their desk, along with the weight of the world.
The lightning-fast dropping of diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives – not just by the U.S. government and its agencies, but workplaces that were not forced to do so – is a betrayal of people and ideals. When organizations that have previously sold themselves as being diversity champions bail on these programs, the message is loud and clear: this was more window-dressing than an actual commitment to inclusion. It was a spineless seeing-which-way-the-wind-was-blowing-and-blowing-with-it tactic – to boost morale, profile, the bottom line.
Canada is experiencing a deep betrayal from the country (specifically its new leadership and his sycophants) that has been our greatest ally. This stab in the back – or from below the world’s largest international border – has been a shock to our systems, as the U.S. bullies Canada economically, while ridiculing and threatening our sovereignty. Hey, neighbour (with a “u”): we sent planes to California to help extinguish your fires! We buy your stuff! We blow vacation budgets visiting your country! (Maybe not this year, though.)
The betrayal of Ukraine is perhaps this historic moment’s most consequential slap in the face, with a possible redrawing of the European map and the terrifying precedent it sets globally. The supposed leader of the free world is choosing to sit down and plot with the Russian despot who invaded Ukraine, rather than Ukraine’s leader. And Mr. Trump, almost unbelievably – although nothing is unbelievable with this guy – had the gall this week to accuse Ukraine of starting it. And to call Volodymyr Zelensky, not Vladimir Putin (or himself) a dictator. “I think I have the power to end this war,” he said – a far cry from his audacious declaration while campaigning that if elected, he would end the war in 24 hours. I suppose this constitutes a betrayal of anyone who voted for the guy on that basis, although anyone who did so was inevitably in for a wake-up call.
While we’re on the topic of redrawn maps, it’s hard to imagine the betrayal survivors of the war in Gaza must feel about this same U.S. President wanting to take over their land and send them elsewhere to live.
This week also brought a new level of betrayal to Jews around the world who are gutted (and it shouldn’t just be Jews, but that’s a whole other betrayal) by the fate of Israel’s Bibas family. For 16 months, we have been shocked by those who justified the hostage-taking of the two little boys on Oct. 7, 2023, as resistance, who defended this barbarity, who ripped down posters of the red-headed children. Kfir Bibas – not quite nine months old when he was abducted with his four-year-old brother Ariel and their mother Shiri – appeared on one of those posters lying on his back, with a big toothless smile, holding a small pink elephant.
For more than a year after the attack, extended family searched through the rubble of their home, looking for that little stuffie. They found it, finally, last month. They hoped it was a good sign.
But hope and goodness were not to be this week. And grief has overpowered the betrayal.