Bracing Ourselves For Political Unpleasantness!

I observed with mixed feelings the departure of a couple of presidential candidates from the race: John Hickenlooper, and Jay Innslee (Inns-Lee).

Hickenlooper: To me he seemed a little behind the times with his ideas, just a little too moderate for progressives to get behind.  He also seemed insufficiently forceful and charismatic, but those are forgivable shortcomings; we can't expect a good president to be charismatic and progressive and moderate and of good character . . . can we?  If he runs for Senator from Colorado, that would be fabulous.

Innslee: His departure seems a serious loss.  I could see Jay Innslee being an excellent president, but I could also see the vast, unimaginative wasteland of American presidential tradition viewing him with disapproval, saying that even Trump would be better.  But Innslee seemed comfortable with assessing ideas from many sources and selecting the best; he did not have to be persuaded that action on Climate Change was necessary; he was not defensive about his candidacy (that I knew about, anyway), he seemed personable, and promised to have cordial relations with all the constituents in Washington.

Tragedy and Aftermath
There were shootings in El Paso, Texas (August 3), and Dayton, Ohio (August 4).  After the El Paso shooting, Candidate Beto O'Rourke canceled his appearance in Iowa (where many candidates were going, in preparation for the Iowa Caucus), and stayed home in El Paso, to express sympathy and solidarity with the mourning city residents.  We should not view this as merely a political move, but it certainly promises well for those sorts of actions from a future president, who has to respond to tragic events that are only too likely to take place during his term.  As a businessman, Trump simply has never had the experiences that would prepare him to handle these sorts of situations.  Trump essentially dealt with it as business as usual.  Experience in business, I must reluctantly say, does not prepare one for anything at all, except to increase profits.

Joe Biden gave a speech, deploring Trump's response / non-response, and lack of moral leadership.  It was well phrased, and hit hard.  Clearly, Joe B. would do well as a focus for moral outrage in cases like these.  If that were all we needed, Joe is clearly our man.  But, in my assessment, Joe is a much better Indian than a Chief (to use a figure that might be frowned upon by the Metaphorical Police).  In the next decade or so, we're going to need a president who isn't starting to think about the various issues that were already rising to the surface before Trump took office, and which have arrived front and center in the last couple of years.  We need a president who has thoroughly understood the issues, and isn't just holding the crib-sheet that the Business Lobby has handed him.

Age
I was somewhat dismayed by how comedian Stephen Colbert (The Late Show) handled the several points above: the shootings, the Trump response, and Joe Biden.  He seemed to find Biden amusing, simply because of his age.  Of course Biden is from an older generation than even Trump (though some of Trump's gaffés betray a mental age far younger than those of any of my readers!), but it is far from axiomatic that we are at a generational moment; that is, that the present battle is between those who want a younger president, and those who want someone of the Joe Beiden / Bernie Sanders generation.

We do know that, historically, older voters have gone to the polls, especially white male ones.  If the elections were to be held tomorrow, we know that there would be a massive turnout.  But we have a year and a few months in which we can use up the interest of the public, which has been squandered over the past several weeks, and to some degree sabotaged by disgruntled young white male nobodies with guns.

The youngest among the candidates are Beto O'Rourke, Pete Buttigieg, Tulsi Gabbard, Julián Castro, Andrew Yang, Tim Ryan, and Cory Booker (in no particular order).  All of them have potential, though some of them need to cook quite a bit longer, in my very humble opinion.  Some of the best candidates, again in my humble opinion, are quite a bit older, though I would be reluctant to say outright that it is their age that gives them their edge.

Business
We in America cannot remember a time before Business had arrived as a political force.  There have always been lobbies, of course; even in the 19th century, we have reports of Congress being petitioned by various individuals, who are the predecessors of lobbyists as we know them now.

Business came into its own very early in the history of the USA, when it was recognized that the Economies of Scale led to great profits.  If you can make money making pottery, for example, you can make a lot of money making a lot of pottery.  Similarly for cars.  Similarly for houses.  Similarly for shopping malls.

Now, without jumping to conclusions, but without being afraid to arrive at conclusions which are inevitable, we must look at business long and steady.  Is it impossible to conceive of a business that does not do whatever it does on a massive scale?  Wherever we look, we can only see businessmen who live by the rule: bigger is better.

Even landfills are now being created on vast scales, because the lifestyle which we love so well requires discarding vast quantities of ancillary materials--packaging--that comes along with whatever we buy.  Of course, all of us are familiar with the problems with recycling plastic.  But none of us are willing to join the dots.

Dare I say it?  Part of the problem is that making cheap gewgaws out of plastic has been the brainwaves of generations of Entrepreneurs.  If we were to call a moratorium on new business ventures that involve plastic, we would dash the dreams of millions of baby would-be venture capitalists who have been groomed to create brightly-colored new businesses with plastics, which create dozens of new jobs, and contribute to the drowning of the world in yet more plastic.

At the moment, the voices raised against the plastics industry are few, and about as unpopular as the gun control movement.  But, however powerful, the plastics industry, like the NRA and Big Oil, has to be confronted and resisted.  The Road More Traveled, the Road of Plastic, must be phased out.

While we're trying to develop clean energy, and while we bundle those individuals who desperately cling to fossil fuels, kicking and screaming, into suitable padded cells, we must also find ways to make the declining years of those who live and breathe Plastic into productive and pleasant ones.

It will not be easy, because New Technology is on the rise, and unfortunately, the material components of New Tech is often heavily plastic-based.  We're not going to find organic substitutes for those shiny new plastic telephone cases very quickly, so we do have to continue to find new and creative locations for almost as many new landfills as we currently have.  But unless we phase out the profligate use of unnecessary hardware, we will soon be reminded of the landscape of Wall-E.

Start small.  Stop your grocery checkout clerk flooding you with unnecessary plastic bags.  Act to minimize junk mail.  Shop at used-clothes stores, like we do.  Wean yourself of the culture of meaningless gifts!  (That's hard; people expect gifts on various occasions.  It may be several decades before we evolve so far as to stop expecting gifts such as for Valentine's Day, for instance.  Hallmark alone has probably set this planet back several decades.)  Don't buy new guns, for instance; there are probably used guns you could easily get, going into the landfills.  Jokes apart: where do old guns go to die?

Eventually, though, we must prepare to be more thoughtful about: what we discard into the sink.  We already collect used cooking oil and grease in bottles, but we throw them in the trash anyway.  We know that these bottles of used cooking oil and grease will someday pollute the ground water.

We will have to be thoughtful about pouring hot water into the sink.  Part of the problem of global warming is the warming of domestic waste water, which eventually flows into rivers, and ultimately, the oceans.  But the temperature of the rivers is rising; in our case, the Susquehanna, and the Chesapeake Bay.  Sure; nobody likes to be told that they're killing off the fish in the Bay, but let's change our behavior before we have to!

Changing
It is easy to view the challenges we're going to face as externally enforced rules which constrain us, and prevent us from doing the usual, merrily destructive stuff that we've done forever, without even realizing that it was a privilege that we're going to have to give up someday.  I remember how we used to tease girls mercilessly back when I was a kid; who knew we were going to have to treat girls like human beings?  And they can vote, too.  And they do, dammit.

The thing to do is to change your angle on things.

Everybody is going to have to deal with our uncomfortable future.  But if I prepare my own kid carefully to deal with the restrictions of the future, it won't be as painful for her or him as it will be for a child who has been brought up with a sense of entitlement about irresponsible behavior.

For instance, there are kids who litter simply because hey, this is a free country.  Of course, litter is unsightly, and reduce the tone of a neighborhood.  But worse, litter gets swept into storm sewers during a rainstorm, and into the river.  Not everyone appreciates a nice, clear river, but nobody appreciates a river full of garbage.  An important first step is to get your kids to appreciate the river in the first place.  The clean-ness of the river just cannot be appreciated if the child never notices the river in the first place, except as a distant geographical feature that is irrelevant to him or her.

It is important to take kids to state and national parks, and to appreciate scenic beauty.  Natural beauty is fast disappearing, and it is a good idea to appreciate what we have, and yet try not to burden them with a sense of foreboding about the future of those features.  It is better for them to have happy memories of the beauty of their childhood environment than to not have experienced them at all.

Travel, and foreign experiences affect different families in different ways!  Sometimes, traveling to distant destinations brings us in close contact to desperately unsightly views of Third World countries.  They try very hard to keep the more disgusting vistas out of the sight of tourists, but sometimes they fail.

Some tourists are appalled, and return home, desperately relieved, and grateful that those same problems have not yet arrived at our shores.  Others are also appalled, but are determined to help any organizations that are dedicated to remedying, or reducing those problems in creative ways.

Company
Finally, one of the most pleasant aspects of deciding to be pro-active about environmental issues, in the most general sense, is to join in the company of like-minded individuals, and their families.  No matter how trying the future can be, it will be far less trying if the young people have friends who feel as they do, that there are things that can be done to make the environment better, and as good as it can be.

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