The text came in from my husband: "Canada is going to be getting warmer all the time."
That was his way of telling me today's news that President Trump is pulling out of the historic, global climate change agreement. It makes me sad and brings to mind the words of Pope Francis in his encyclical letter "On Care for Our Common Home":
"Reducing greenhouse gases requires honesty, courage and responsibility, above all on the part of those countries which are more powerful and pollute the most."
Leadership "...is manifest when, in difficult times, we uphold high principles and think of the long-term common good."
"International negotiations cannot make significant progress due to positions taken by countries which place their national interests above the global common good. Those who will have to suffer the consequences...will not forget this failure of conscience and responsibility."
We must hear “both the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor.”
President Trump's decision to withdraw from the Paris climate agreement will have historic, monumental, and grave consequences for public health. The most vulnerable will suffer. As an American, I already feel responsible for that suffering.
Georges Benjamin, MD, executive director of the American Public Health Association released a statement saying:
"Today’s reckless decision is further abdication of leadership at the federal level to protect public health."
Yesterday I saw a grade school boy in Virginia who was wearing one of those red "Make America Great Again" baseball caps. I hope he quickly sheds that cap and learns that America can never be great with a President who ignores science and uses his power to favor the few over the many.
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As I grant Trump his due in my Mentifex on Trump Ponzi Madoff Vesco Bilko, Donald J. Trump is the Shahanshah of Scammers, the Ne Plus Ultra of Sexual Predators, the Scamgod, the Swindler King, the Con Man of Coney Island, and the Sexual Assaulter of Beauty Pageant Contestants.
Using the electoral college and gerrymandering, the Republicans managed to put into power a team with distinctly narcissistic, misogynistic, racist, and sadistic personality disorders, a group with a taste for treachery and hypocrisy, and with an overall goal of bringing America back to a smaller minded culture with a strange combination of traits of the treacherous American confederacy, the cult of the flag, and the Neanderthal 1950's. Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?
So the primitives...the Bannons, the Priebuses, the Millers... are having their day in the sun. Our current crop of alpha monkeys have been selected for there positions based on their successful exploitation of humanity's worst weaknesses, and due to the repeated failure of the business community to use the tele medium for anything more than a vehicle for exercising the freedom to do and encourage stupid things. We seem to have made a transition from a world where the goal once was, ideally, to select wise leaders to make regulations to help promote the general welfare and control stupid behavior, to a world based on an economy which depends on the satisfaction of stupid desires. Fast cars, status symbols, addictive drugs, mindless consumption, conspicuous waste, religiosity.
I personally have faith that the laws of nature will bring the Donald and his Putinized company to ground the same way it done with the other tyrants in history, and, further, that the U.S. Of A is the best hope of the world for making this happen. We have the mechanisms available to impeach and eject this completely self centered idiot.
There is much work to be done.
We are Canadians. My wife, who pays little attention to politics, said yesterday, "Maybe we're all better off without the US in this agreement?"
I think this is a perceptive comment. Why does the US have to claim to be "the world leader" in every field when it's clearly not (life expectancy, anyone)? The rest of the world is better off stepping up to its own responsibilities, instead of having to deal with the US penchant for trying to game other countries' internal politics, even when there's nothing to be gained. Meanwhile, the US clearly has some internal issues it needs to deal with after 100+ years of using foreign adventures to distract voters from the problems at home.