But like so many stories about events outside of the United States, little American attention is being paid to this faraway tragedy.
President Donald Trump promised to put America First, and his opponents denounced that kind of political narrow-mindedness and egoistic exclusion. But on both sides of the aisle, we've let that me-first vision win.
The United States is in a crisis. We are more divided than ever. A hostile foreign power meddled in our elections, and we remain unprotected against future infiltration. Our President, who has been accused of sexual harassment or assault by more than a dozen women, nominated a man to the Supreme Court who stands accused of attempted rape and appears to have lied under oath. Now he's an associate justice on the Supreme Court. There is a lot to worry about within our own borders.
But we make a huge mistake -- and abdicate America's pivotal role in the global order -- if we think we can ignore the rest of the world. And yet that's exactly what voters left, right and center appear to be doing. The large media outlets that are tarred as "liberal" for their rigorous fact-checking and actual reporting continue to cover world affairs. But few seem to be reading or reacting. Where is the American outcry for aid to countries in dire need?
The Indonesia crisis is case in point. Thousands of homes have been destroyed, and the number of lives lost keeps ticking upward as more bodies are recovered. Officials say 62,000 people have been displaced. And they are desperate for basic supplies, including food and water. Indonesia's rescue equipment is outdated and much of it is unusable, leaving many rescuers to dig with their hands.
Devastated infrastructure and telecommunications also make the rescue and aid efforts all the more difficult. According to the United Nations, some 200,000 people need immediate assistance.
Yet this story had pretty much dropped out of the headlines in America. And our government clearly doesn't feel much urgency to help. So far, USAID has released a paltry $100,000 of initial aid to Indonesia, and there don't seem to be vociferous demands for more -- at least not within the United States. Leadership from the top is missing: the Trump administration has been gunning to drastically cut USAID's budget. Doing so would make it harder to respond to international emergencies, and would cut crucial programs that promote development, diplomacy and peace-building. Congress stepped in to save the funding -- this time.
The United States should be a leader in foreign assistance, both to humanitarian crises and development more generally. A safe, stable, peaceful and prosperous world benefits everyone; helping to make that world a reality is the right thing to do, but also serves American interests.
Instead, we are blocking the rest of the world out, and refusing to extend as much of a helping hand as we could. Last month, the Trump administration announced that the United States, once a beacon for refugees, would allow in no more than 30,000 desperate people seeking safe haven from violent conflicts and climates of terror within their countries. For context, there are 69 million displaced people in the world today.
The United States, a country of vast landmass and incredible wealth, could invite many more of them in, and historically, we have. But this change was met with little more than a resigned shrug -- if people noticed at all.
All of this has a political impact. Foreign policy has been notably absent from discussions about the midterm elections. Our navel-gazing politics also feed into something more subtle and psychic that was crucial to Trump's rise: A narcissistic national assumption that America is the most important country in the world, and that American people are inherently more deserving of resources and attention than others.
It's natural to pay more attention to what's happening on our own patch, in our own nation, and in our names. But we've gone beyond that. It's not just that we don't pay enough attention to the rest of the world -- that's always been true. It's that the rise of Trump has made America First not just a right-wing slogan, but our national consciousness.
If we want to push back on this mentality -- if we think we are better than this, a generous nation that is a participant in the world -- we won't do it by building walls that keep our attention and our energies inside America only. We need to look outward, and see how we can extend the best of American values. We can start with aiding Indonesia.
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