Isn't Mother Nature good enough to lead?

There’s a saying, “You are what you eat.”

In this case, our daily news diet.

Currently, our intake seems to be all Trump, and almost exclusively Trump. Even if something comes up that takes our attention away from the current White House occupant, president Butternut Squash will emit a Tweet with dog-whistle frequency that calls the national press corps back to yap as his ankles.

But Trump isn’t the only newsworthy subject happening right now. Nor is the continued fallout from the #MeToo movement, the Parkland shooting, the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election (oops, Trump again), standing for the national anthem (dang it!), ad infinitum.

The eruption of Mount Kilauea on the big island of Hawai’i got some ink and tape, but only for awhile. But let another volcano go off, this one killing scores of people and not just consuming property, and if you’re lucky to find anything on it, it’s buried inside the front section of the local daily, or a short segment on a national channel.

And then we’re back to whether or not Trump can pardon himself. (Editor’s note: When I heard this, the image that came to mind was a painting I once saw of Napoleon crowning himself emperor of France. Charming.)

Volcán de Fuego in Guatemala erupted Sunday afternoon, decimating two villages on its slopes. As of this writing, 69 people have died, dozens injured and hundreds evacuated from what meager homes they have, losing everything.

These people don’t have insurance, making rebuilding challenging. They also don’t have much disaster relief, so whatever they get will likely have to come from the international community.

I know this from experience. In 2014, a landslide (the land moves a lot in Guatemala) wiped out half of the village of Monte Blanco, and several others nearby in the Baja Verapaz Mountains of central Guatemala.

A mission delegation I was on at the time pooled our resources and — through Facebook — elicited help from friends in this county to raise enough money to buy basic foodstuffs, enough to feed 180 families for about two weeks. Local Guatemalan ingenuity made that food go farther and longer.

It was the only aid they received. Nothing from the government’s disaster agency. At the time, they were too busy dealing with the effects of a regional drought, a recent earthquake and perpetual dysfunction emblematic of most Third World countries.

We can partly thank our government for the latter ailment, and by extension, ourselves.

The most current news I have been able to receive about the eruption’s aftermath has come from friends I have in the Central American country. I even have a personal connection to Volcán de Fuego — at the beginning of a trip in 2013, I stepped away from a breakfast in the nearby city of Antigua onto the cafe balcony in time to see it belching smoke and ash.

I’ll show you the pictures.

I admit I have a lot of interest in what happens in Guatemala, but natural disasters don’t seem to rate as newsworthy too much anymore, unless they happen to us. Consequently, we tend to move on to the next news event.

Remember the hurricane that hit Puerto Rico? They’re still suffering from its aftermath, despite the current administration’s glowing report of how well it did responding, but not so most people would know it.

When the news we get is focused inwardly, we lose sight of a larger picture of our own humanity. We grow fat on self-centeredness.

Like it or not, we are part of a larger world. There will come a time when we will need the support of others.

Hopefully they will remember to give us something to eat, and not just platitudes about how kind they are.

John McCallum can be reached at jmac@cheneyfreepress.com.