Trying Not to Shout

My Facebook post was about Belleau Wood and the President's reported remarks about the dead being "suckers." His response was about the relative merit of remarks in poor taste as compared to accomplishments and progress. He was polite and personal; so was I. Did it make a difference?

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Hi, Dick. 

 Nice to hear from you. I hope things are going well in Florida. 

 

I'm glad to read that you will be voting in November (not that I expected anything less), but I am very sad to hear that you will be voting for the incumbent. I have several friends who will be doing the same. Each one of your votes saddens and frightens me. 

 

That fear and sorrow is, incidentally, one of the reasons that I donated yesterday not only to

Joe Biden, but also to Captain Mark Kelly, Jaime Harrison, Sara Gideon, Amy McGrath, J.D. Scholten, and Phil Arballo. It is among the bigger reasons that I am a repeat donor to Gretchen Driskell and will soon be sending a check to John Hickenlooper. If Democrats once again win the popular presidential vote without controlling the Electoral College, we’ll need as many people of principle, vision, and compassion in the House and Senate as we can get.

 

To answer your question about poor taste, I confess! I have absolutely said things in poor taste (and thought many more of them). But I have not lied to the people to whom I said them, nor have I repeatedly tried to convince them that they did not hear me with their own ears. I am quite sure that you have not either because I know you to be a man who has built his career on accountability.

 

If we were only talking about poor taste, I would be far less worried than I am. A country can survive poor taste. 

 

What a country cannot survive is having its putative leader urge people to vote twice and thereby commit a crime. That suggestion is particularly cynical, in my opinion, because said leader organized the Voter Fraud Commission in 2017. He had a great deal to say about people who voted twice then and none of it included the idea that they were stress-testing the electoral process.

 

Most of all, what a country cannot survive is having a leader who muses publicly about whether he will accept the results of the election.

 

And yet…so much more worries me. 

 

A country cannot survive having its leader refuse to even acknowledge the towering injustice of a man being suffocated in the street by a police officer who knelt on his neck for eight minutes and forty-six seconds, shortly after a woman was shot to death in her own home in the middle of the night by a police team looking for someone who wasn’t there, and shortly before another unarmed man was shot seven times in the back at point blank range by police, while his children cowered in the back seat of the car he was getting into.

 

How does a country torn apart by those injustices survive hearing the President of the United States publicly threaten to de-fund schools if they include the Pulitzer Prize winning 1619 Project in their curricula? How does 14% of our population experience those devastating losses and then read their leader’s threat without concluding that their government means to erase them and their history?

 

It was 3:00 p.m. in Oakland when I started this and it was ninety-nine degrees. That probably doesn’t sound hot to a Floridian, but here it is unheard of—or it used to be, anyway. 

 

There was a loud, peaceful demonstration in the park two blocks away. There were no looters. There were no guns. There were no truck drivers or passengers pepper-spraying and paint-balling the demonstrators. Oaklanders are not, as the president declared publicly, “living in hell.” I am, however, worried about whether the rhododendron can take another several days of this heat.

 

You probably know we had a rare lightning storm a couple of weeks ago. You probably also know that it generated scores of wildfires--some of the fires are 95% contained, some are still not yet under any control at all. So far, nearly two million acres have burned. 

 

Credit: National Guard

Today, two hundred campers had to be evacuated by helicopter when the fast-growing Creek Fire cut off their only escape route. “Flames moved in so fast that at one point people were advised to ‘shelter in place’ - in the reservoir itself if need be.”

 

That was down near Fresno—Republican country. People sometimes forget how red much of California is. 

 

What have we—a state of thirty-nine and a half million people—heard from the President of the United States as firefighters work around the clock to save lives and property? 

 

“Maybe we’re just going to have to make them pay for it because they don’t listen to us.” 

 

Footnote here: 60% of California's forest lands are under federal management and another one-third is privately held. So, if there has been mismanagement of California forests, as the president is fond of alleging, it has not been state mismanagement. 

Worse than the heat today is the air quality index. It was an unhealthy 153 at three o'clock. It has only been good for a handful of hours over the last couple of weeks. Red, burning eyes are becoming routine and, on the worst days, so is coughing. What must it be like for those brave men and women working on the front lines?

 

You have hurricanes, we have wildfires. I know the National Hurricane Center is currently monitoring two tropical depressions. Each has a high probability of growing into real trouble. With luck, they won’t make landfall. Texas and Louisiana were fortunate to have only been hit by one of the two hurricanes they were facing, but I know the people of Lake Charles aren’t feeling fortunate at the moment--Katrina, Rita, Laura, it's been a devastating fifteen years.

 

Whether or not we pull out of the Paris Accords may not matter anymore. Still, I try to do my part. That’s really all one individual can do—her or his part.

 

We put solar on the house last year, my Prius is fifteen years old, most of our lighting is LED, and we do not have air conditioning. I can’t really take credit for that last bit of energy efficiency though. When our house was built in 1951, no one needed air-conditioning in Oakland. Now, I’m wondering if I can find the money to install a thing called a whole house fan. 

 

Given the efforts Bob and I have made to reduce our carbon footprint, you won’t be surprised to read that I was devastated to see that the current administration is rolling back standards for how coal-fired power plants dispose of wastewater laced with lead, selenium, and arsenic. It's too late for us, but all that long-lived poison is endangering the health our children and grandchildren so that a handful of coal mines can continue to produce the dirtiest fuel on earth. It’s a dangerous, and pyrrhic, victory. The coal industry has been in decline for a century. Polluting our rivers and lakes will not save it.

 

Source: National Mining Association and EIA

 

 

 

 

I could go on--children separated from their parents, census data collection being de-railed, cabinet members whose graft and corruption are mind-boggling (one example being Wilbur Ross), an inexplicable preference for our enemies over our allies, one hundred and eighty-eight thousand dead Americans—but I won’t.

 

In closing, what I will say is what I think is already clear: It is not because of poor taste that I am praying the incumbent will be a one-term president. It is because of his record. 

 

Thanks for reading this far, Dick. I'm sure it wasn't easy and I appreciate you doing it.

 

With  all the best, 

 

Joan