To the Editor:
Everybody knows that certain groups of people in the United States are responsible for sucking the lifeblood out of this great country, and they know who they are, and we know who they are.
The worst offenders that add to our deficit year after year are, of course, the poverty-stricken, and then there’s the handicapped, the elderly, the disabled, and those darn dirty little brats and slobbering babies from low-income families! Of course, I’m not referring to Norwegian low-income families.
It’s about time that these groups and others like them pay their fair share! I’ve given this issue some serious consideration, and I’ve come up with a plan!
This plan will be named the Trump Snap Back Food Retrieval Initiative, which will also be known as the TSBFRI, or simply the Trump Snap Back!
Under this progressive program, the recipients of all government-subsidized food programs will be ordered to immediately return, at their own expense, government shutdown or not, all uneaten and unused food that they have received from these programs within the past year.
This plan may not compare to Trump’s courageous granting of a blanket clemency for nearly 1,600 of the insurrectionists that participated in the destructive riot at our Capitol on Jan. 6, and this initiative may not completely solve our great nation’s financial shortcomings, but it will be another positive step forward, and yet another honorable one of Trump’s greatest endeavors! There can be no greater pride than a job well done!
Peter Pfluger
Vineyard Haven
Jan 6 was a day when democracy itself almost died
Trumps master plan almost worked
His ” insurrection ” plan was to send a guy with a loincloth and Fred flintstone lodge hat into the capitol chambers. He was supposed to sit in speaker pelosi’s chair , grab the gavel, and declare he was in charge
At that point the entire country would obey his every command. After all, he was in the speaker’s chair.
Had not all the grannies taking selfies got in the way, his rebel army, armed with flag poles, would have gone back home, and grabbed the guns they forgot to bring and come back to follow the grand Poobaa’s orders
I understand that Peter Pfluger’s “Trump Snap Back Food Retrieval Initiative” is satire. Satire is supposed to punch up at power. Here, it mostly knees the poor, the elderly, and disabled kids in the ribs and calls it wit. Edgy.
On Martha’s Vineyard, the supposed “lifeblood-suckers” are teachers, line cooks, landscapers, and retirees trying to stay fed in a housing market that thinks it’s Monaco. If these folks are truly bankrupting America, Wall Street must be asleep at the wheel — clearly it’s been chasing the wrong culprits.
SNAP — the program cast here as a national scourge — makes up under 2% of federal spending, with fraud so low it barely registers. Unless toddlers and retirees have launched a grocery-racketeering ring, this premise collapses.
The letter also jokes about clemency for Jan. 6 defendants — over 1,200 charged, many for assaulting police. Calling that “honorable” is a comic instinct better aimed at the powerful who encouraged it, not the neighbors struggling with food insecurity.
If the goal was to mock Trump-style policymaking, mission partly accomplished. But when satire punches down, it starts echoing the cruelty it claims to lampoon. Our neighbors deserve dignity, not mockery.
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