The Story of Paul — Not That Paul
The USAID Fiasco: Throwing out civilization with the bathwater
In the 1980s I was in church leadership in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. This was in California.
A young man came to us. He was destitute. He had AIDS.
His name was definitely not Paul, but will be called Paul for our purposes.
He had been living in the Bay Area, near San Francisco. He was from Utah. He said he had contracted AIDS from riding on a motorcycle.
Paul indicated that he had about six months to live. Checking with his doctors, we confirmed this condition. He could not go back home. He told us that his family had declared that he had long been dead to them. We also confirmed this with them on the phone.
The bishop, my superior, declared that we would help Paul. I arranged for an apartment in town for him and helped him obtain food. After a time, as he was active and capable, I arranged a telephone-based job for him in a company where I had influence.
Paul had several month of peace and of success. He got along really well with the people at work — most of whom were nurses — and he was able to engage with people in a most cheerful and entertaining way. He had a marvelous personality.
Pretty much on schedule, his condition suddenly deteriorated. During a nighttime of pain, he used his work telephone card to call some ‘900’ calls. They were clearly sexually-explicit calls. Within days, he died alone in his apartment. He had received visitors regularly through this period — mostly church members who came to visit him, to cheer him up, etc. Many have volunteered to help and, given that this was Mormonism to be sure, many had been assigned to visit Paul.
We were very sad that he had died alone, but we were happy about the more favorable conditions he experienced in his last days. We made arrangements and held a funeral for Paul, which was well-attended.
Did the bishop do the right thing? Did the church do the right thing? Did the rest of us do the right things? My sense is that in the current environment, many would say “no”. This is a small example of the vast travesty that we can see in the attack on USAID by current leadership and apparently a large share of the man’s supporters.
Most of the outrage against USAID seems to come from those who pronounce disapproval of life choices of many of the people in need. As with Paul in our case, these are people with religious or moral objections to LGBTQ lifestyles. They seem to be saying that since they have personal objections to such lifestyles, the others should not be helped or supported, even in the most basic of ways.
Such judgments are wildly askew from the message of Christianity to be sure. As probably the most preeminent, vocal critics of USAID cite religion as the basis for their objections, many have pointed out the deep wrongness of this. It doesn’t seem to matter to the critics, who seem to be having fun fanning the flames behind the “7th highest share of the vote for an out-of-power party’s nominee since 1932” (PBS https://tinyurl.com/4ewhy9ee).
They cheer at the fundamental demise of USAID.
The story about Paul is not over. When I helped Paul, I was a general partner in a venture capital fund. A few years later, my two partners elected to force me out, insisting that I had never been a general partner apart from the fact that I had started the thing and there were hundreds of documents, legal and otherwise, proving the point. Their plan was to simply string me out until I gave up.
Does this sound like the kind of thing that a current political actor, currently president of the United States, would do? Bingo, time and time again. Strangely, people keep stepping up to his whackamole game, including 58% of the recent voters in Utah. Actually, upon reflection, Paul’s case might have been more than a little telling in such matters.
So, I found myself facing my former partners in Superior Court. There was a lot of back-and-forth, but there was one matter that definitely came up. They had gone through the financials of the portfolio company in question and found the ‘900’ calls that Paul had taken just before he died.
Their attorney clearly loved telling the story of my support for Paul from the perspective of “financial prudence” and the “possibility” that I had been and possibly still was a member of a certain “community”. He wasn’t talking about the church. WINK.
What can you say? This is somewhere in the realm of criticisms by the Fox crowd of Samantha Power and the placements and programs by USAID under her leadership. I stand with her, with them.
Also, it is important to note that USAID and other developmental and humanitarian commitments did not break the bank for USA. Wars did. In in the last two years of the Clinton Administration, there were approximately $200 billion budget surpluses each year. Economists were worried that four more years of the same under Bush would extinguish the debt in its entirety and force the economists to peg their efforts on something other than interest rates.
I was never a fan of Clinton’s, but he sure left office with a bang. A good bang.