It’s raining in Gaza. It’s winter and it’s cold. As part of the ceasefire, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu agreed to allow 600 trucks a day into Gaza with supplies. Gaza’s government says the Israelis have only allowed 28% of them to come through. People are starving. Children are dying every day from hunger. It’s a slow painful death. We paid for the bombs that made 2 million people homeless. We are the only ones the Israelis will listen to.

Call U.S. Rep. Nick Langworthy at (716) 488-8111. He is our District 23 representative in Washington. He can put pressure on the administration to increase the number of trucks going into Gaza. Calling his office might remind him we still care about Gaza. That we see the starvation as deliberate and he can not say in the future that he didn’t know.

The Trump administration has plans for Gaza as a seaside resort. They have no plans for the people that live there now except to try and get third countries to take them.

All of the Arab countries in the region have rejected that idea. No one wants thousands of hungry refugees coming into their country. So the starvation continues, the results most satisfactory to empty the land.

As the people who made and financed the bombs that have leveled Gaza, do we here in the U.S. have a responsibility to the victims? We’re very shy about responsibility when it comes to guns. About 78% of the people in the country support some kind of Gun Control Legislation. We have an epidemic of young white men from good homes suddenly shooting up a church or a grocery store because they are hunting ethnic populations. They are being radicalized online. Without common sense regulations companies will continue to exploit our information and our weaknesses.

Another way the Tech industry is negatively affecting the future are these data centers. They are a threat to the lifestyle we enjoy. They will take up a lot of drinking water we all depend on and they also need huge amounts of electricity. Traditionally when a system is upgraded all the ratepayers share the cost of the upgrade. The idea being that everyone benefits from a better system. This time is different; we are being charged to upgrade a system that will not benefit us. A Data Center won’t employ that many people but Artificial Intelligence is projected to take millions of jobs. We are financing our own demise.

The future the tech industry is creating for us is very grim. They openly talk of being free of the burden of labor. What will we be when we are no longer needed to turn every wheel? We need to talk seriously about universal basic income. We need to talk about the basic dignity of every human being and that food, shelter and healthcare are human rights.

The 1% will have to pay their fair share in taxes for us to finance a system that works for everyone. That is exactly what they are afraid of. Yes we would be taking from those who have more than they need to eat in order to feed everyone. We grow enough food on the planet right now that no one needs to go hungry. The extra soybeans taking up grain elevators in the west right now could be feeding the people of Gaza if we had a system that was based on valuing human life.

What will it take to get the grain from an elevator in Illinois to a hungry person in Gaza? If it can not be done at a profit it will not happen. To tie every action to profit and loss is to reduce us to cogs in the machine.

We have an opportunity to step outside the machine. There is a nationwide Spend Small movement from Nov. 28 to Dec. 2. During those five days, visit a little store in your town that you have never entered. You don’t know what you might find and the storekeeper will be glad for the increased traffic. Even if you don’t buy anything, if 100 people walked through their doors, someone might find something.

Marie Tomlinson is a Fredonia resident. Send comments to editorial@observertoday.com