SETTING THE CLOCK—AND AMERICANS—BACKOctober 31, 2025

Sunday at 2:00 am, we’ll turn our clocks back one hour. Sadly, the month-long federal government shutdown is turning the national clock back to eras when millions of Americans went to bed hungry and sick. 

Venture capitalists, bank executives, senior tech bro—they’re fine. But tens of millions of Americans live from paycheck to paycheck. Others don’t have one. Tomorrow, Washington’s shutdown will hurl these folks backward. 

With the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) no longer funded, cupboards will start emptying for 42 million Americans. Who says? The U.S. Department of Agriculture.  

Who’s to blame? 

USDA has gone MAGA. Its web home page carries a political message: “Senate Democrats have now voted 12 times to not fund the food stamp program… They can continue to hold out for healthcare for illegal aliens and gender mutilation procedures or reopen the government so mothers, babies, and the most vulnerable among us can receive critical nutrition assistance.” 

According to factually.co, “Undocumented immigrants are generally ineligible for federally funded Affordable Care Act (ACA or “Obamacare”) plans, Medicaid, CHIP, and Medicare under current federal rules.” Congress.gov reports, “…aliens are ineligible for federal public benefits unless they are qualified aliens.” Qualified means legal. 

Yesterday in Massachusetts, federal judge Indira Talwani heard a lawsuit brought by two dozen states demanding available funds be used to continue SNAP. Administration officials acknowledged that an emergency reserve exists but claim they cannot legally use it. Said Talwani, “Congress has put money in an emergency fund. It’s hard for me to understand how this isn’t an emergency…” She’ll render a decision today. 

The shutdown also has put healthcare at risk. Obamacare premiums will rise an average of 26% in 2026—and substantially more without federal subsidies. Republicans are willing to let subsidies slide.   

Food and healthcare should be off the political table. Professions of concern don’t cut it. For example, copious thoughts and prayers go out to victims of mass shootings at schools, churches, synagogues and malls. Yet Congress and statehouses avoid enacting legislation to limit dangerous weapons and access to them. Thoughts and prayers may reach the dead but leave the living at risk. 

As to charity—yes, there are millions of charitable people in America—the word derives from the Latin caritas, which means love. Leviticus 19:18 enjoins us, “Love your neighbor as yourself.”  

But love requires more than affection. It requires action. I look to Jewish tradition, which holds that assisting the poor requires a different mindset. 

Rabbi Elliot Dorff, a leading Jewish ethicist, writes: “The word for ‘charity’ in Hebrew, ‘tzedakah,’ is a derivative of the word ‘tzedek,’ meaning ‘justice.’ Another derivative of that word is ‘tzadik,’ ‘a righteous person.’ We care for the poor because it is the just and righteous thing to do.” (To Do the Right and the Good, 138.) 

Political lust and the culture war supporting it have grown out of hand. Some Americans would send us back to segregation, pro-Nazi Germany sympathies in the 1930s, life’s uncertainties before Social Security (1935), and the Gilded Age of the 1890s when the rich left millions of Americans to fend for themselves in rural poverty and urban slums.  

It’s time not only to set our clocks back an hour but move lightyears forward towards basic humanity. 

Please pass this on. 

My new novel, RIDE THE TYGER, will be available very, very soon.