For the second time in as many months and days after the U.S. Senate advanced the Trump administration’s controversial budget bill, a handful of St. Croix residents elicited a steady stream of supporting honks on the Christiansted Bypass on Saturday morning.
“In the past couple of days, they’ve passed the horrendous bill that is going to impact so many people in this country — all of us,” said organizer Emelyn Morris-Sayre. “And not only on the mainland, but on the island as well, and so many people are just not aware of how it’s going to impact us here.”
Michelle Maso, another organizer, cited the territory’s reliance on the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration — which houses the National Weather Service — Medicaid, and SNAP.
“And what they’re doing to the veterans,” Morris-Sayre said. “It’s outrageous, it’s horrendous, and I’m so disappointed in the legislators in the country that, I mean, they have failed us. And you’re going to see — as it starts to impact people — people that voted for [Donald Trump], it’s like, ‘oh, it’s going to affect me,’ finally. ‘Oh, maybe I made a mistake.’ But unfortunately, a lot of people are going to die before they come to that realization.”
Morris-Sayre pointed to policies like the dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development. In a widely reported study published last week, one medical journal estimated that the agency’s programs helped prevent more than 91 million deaths across the globe in the past two decades. Dismantling the agency “could result in more than 14 million additional deaths by 2030, including 4.5 million deaths among children younger than 5 years.”
Maso noted that it was important for Virgin Islanders to stand in solidarity with the continental United States even though they don’t have a voice in federal elections.
“It may be us in our small little community,” she said. “If we could just show that we care and we’re impacted and we want to have a say, maybe it’s just going to encourage more inspiration.”
