A War or Genocide?

Many of us are finding it increasingly difficult to get out of bed in the morning. The daily news is punishing. If you're one of us, a person perpetually living in dread, this film won't make it better. Watch it anyway.

This is what genocide looks like. The old story of the frog being cooked to death in water that slowly warms, is the story of us living under Trump rule. The actions by the President and his EPA chief, Scott Pruitt, could well mean the end of humankind. Slowly. Almost imperceptibly... CO2 accumulates, fires rage, water swallows us whole. While we watch all the other shenanigans going on in this deeply dysfunctional, reactionary, near-tyrannical administration, every meaningful government action or program to minimize the impact of climate change is being annihilated. 

The courts are increasingly stacked against environmentalists and their efforts to protect public health and well-being. Trump is loading up those courts with far right judges all the way from crucial appeals courts to the Supreme Court of the United States. Our last bastion against the forces Trump has unleashed has always been the courts. Those are now becoming a substantial barrier to protecting the future. Our armamentarium has never been so compromised.  

Those who thought all candidates were equally evil are complicit in creating the nightmare we all live in. They cannot be absolved of responsibility for what is happening. 

And a message to the Resistance, of which I've been a part: No amount of letters, phone calls and faxes will fix this. Scott Pruitt isn't listening. Large crowds in the streets -- and I mean large ....thousands --  will draw attention to the gravity of the situation. But only a monumental effort to get voters to throw out fossil fuel supporters and climate deniers has any chance at all of saving us. It isn't clear that if we are successful in turning around the entire government in 2020 that there will be sufficient time to hold the line against catastrophe. It is clear that only by electing an entirely Democratic Congress and a Democratic president can there be any hope of enacting macro level climate action in our country.     

The most important litmus test we can have for candidates in 2018 and beyond is a commitment to climate action.  But those candidates also have to be able to win election in red states in sufficient numbers to ensure a groundswell of action. The strategy that will accomplish that is as yet uncertain. In the meantime, the water in our collective pot gets warmer and warmer.