Ask Congress to Help with Water Access

There are plenty of things that we don’t need to stick our collective American noses in, for sure. Should we be policing the world? Hells no. Should we have a military base in every metropolitan area in the world? Nope. But should we give two cents about access to safe, clean water everywhere? That’s an affirmative.

Water access is a huge issue. About 900 million people go without safe, clean drinking water every single day—which puts most of us with our petty issues to shame. Sure, I had to give up Netflix and our rec center membership when my husband was laid off, and most of our bills are pretty behind (including the water bill), but at least we have access to safe, clean water that’s not about to give us dysentery or death.

Every year, almost 2 million children die just because they did not have access to clean drinking water. Could you imagine watching your child die from not having water, of all things? Most of us parents, no matter our financial situation, will fight tooth and nail to get our children what they need to survive. But what if you weren’t born in America, where access to water is much easier to obtain, and instead you were born miles from a clean water source?

Right now Congress is thinking about cutting the programs we currently have in place that help some of the world’s poorest peoples obtain clean, safe drinking water. These are not expensive programs; in fact, they comprise about .002% of our budget. Millions of people rely on these programs and it would be unconscionable to turn away from them, letting even more millions of children die from dehydration due to our own greed.

The host of this petition implores that it is our moral obligation to provide this funding as one of the richest nations in the world. We may have many of the richest people in our nation, I’ll grant you that—but many of them don’t pay taxes, and 99% of us aren’t rich. I understand that you are likely already angry with Congress and that you want jobs and aid for the American people. So do I. But without this funding, these people, no matter their job status, will die. We don’t need to do this out of a moral obligation of our false richness; we need to do it simply because it’s the right thing to do.

Please tell Congress to make their cuts elsewhere and to keep the funding of these water programs as they stand intact. Click here to add your signature to a letter asking that these programs be kept.