Aldous Huxley spoke of the dangers and pressures of population growth. You can find an interview with Mike Wallace (circa 1958) here:
Huxley makes the point that between the time of the birth of Christ and the landing of the Mayflower the population of the earth doubled. It rose from about 250 million to 500 million. He warned that the rate of doubling population has increased at an alarming and unsustainable pace.
When Huxley conducted this interview with Mike Wallace the population had risen to 2 billion. Alarming! Right? I was five years old at the time of the Huxley interview.
Today the population of the earth is roughly 8 billion. This means that in my lifetime the population has quadrupled. This is completely unsustainable… and frankly is on the verge of collapse.
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Since the time of the Reagan presidency the Republican party has been completely taken over… bought and paid for by big international business interests. The Democratic party has, as well, been bought off, with at least 60 percent of elected democrats being beholden to big business for their wealth and prosperity.
What’s important about the take-over of our democracy by the military-industrial complex (a term coined by Eisenhower) is that these interests have engaged in unsustainable practices that are destroying our planet. We are dumping poisons onto the earth, into the air, and into the water.
Worried about global warming? I want to tell you… global warming is NOT the worst thing that is about to happen to our planet.
We arrive at a time that the oceans are literally dying. Bird populations are dramatically declining; insect populations are disappearing at an alarming rate. Species are disappearing. The natural forces that put oxygen into our atmosphere (and our oceans) are teetering on the brink of exhaustion.
The dominoes are already falling.
The Brazilian effort to burn down the rain forests is shocking. These forests have been referred to as “the lungs of the Earth”. How do you think life on earth will go when the lungs are gone. Scientists are studying events in Brazil, trying to assess the “tipping point”.
We can see small evidence all around us that we are being poisoned. I live at the confluence of the Moskingum and Ohio rivers. Did you know… you can’t eat the fish out of these rivers? The fish are toxic with the poisons that we dump into them. That poison drains off the continent into the oceans creating vast dead zones where nothing lives.
Around the country I hear stories of dogs dying. Mom takes the dog down to the local pond and allows the dog to take a brief swim. Later that night the dog is dead… from a condition called Toxic Algae.
This is all wrong. And it’s not a moral kind of wrong, it’s a fatal, existential kind of wrong.
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Now, let’s get back to the premise that “DONALD TRUMP WILL SAVE THE WORLD!”
We need in America the leadership of very smart people who care and will take dramatic action to mend our ways. [You must like Tom Steyer!] That was not going to happen under the status quo, go-along-to-get-along leadership that Democrats have been giving us since Bill Clinton.
Trump, bless his pointy little head, has gone all in on giving over our country to the big rich aristocrat 1%. He has appointed judges that will rule in favor of big rich industry over the interest of the common man and the working man; He has canceled or gutted or defunded policy that protects out air and water and earth; He has fired the scientists in the EPA and FDA who served to protect us from the worst instincts of industry; He forbids the science and reporting that will even tell us when our local water and air has been poisoned [or that your dog will die if he goes for a swim]. Indeed, Trump put the Petrochemical industry in charge of the EPA!
For this discussion we will overlook that his administration has done and plans to do exactly the opposite of everything he promised to do in 2016 and what he promised last night in his State of Union speech.
I’m enraged that Trump has victimized those who support him the most. Towns all up and down the Ohio valley (my part of the world, mind you) live in broken communities whose factories have shuttered. They are hopeless and abandoned. Trump cynically targeted them by calling attention to their plight. It’s natural that they would rally to the only candidate that even acknowledge them. Except, of course, he has betrayed them at every turn.
[In his state of the union speech Trump touted the rise of wages for lower class workers under his leadership. But doesn’t bother to mention that that these raises came from states with Democratic governance who raised the minimum wage. There were NO raises in minimum wage in states with Republican governance.]
Trump has been a useful idiot for the Republican party. Moscow Mitch, the Senate majority speaker has stopped something on the order of 400 bills sent up from the House that he won’t even present to the Senate for debate or vote. These are bills that benefit the interest of working people and common citizens. He will not allow anything that doesn’t exclusively benefit the richest 1% of our country to show up on the senate floor.
Donald Trump is a liar, a corrupt, and incompetent man. He has hurt us badly in almost every way imaginable. And his crimes have been so great that a new generation will arise in 2020 and sweep this corrupt pestilence out of the White House… and hope upon hope, out of the Senate.
And now we have a chance to obtain the leadership of smart people, people who care about our environment and life on earth.
The job of saving the world is bigger than just the United States. But if the United States takes the lead we can influence the direction of all the world and possibly enter an era in which we are committed to save life on earth.
Thank you, Donald!
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