Now that our nation's checks and balances have given way to one-party rule, dissent is repressed by the intolerant and self-righteous with the help of lobbyists, alternate facts and a swath of the middle class legitimately too busy struggling to subsist.
While an ironic zeitgeist supports the divine right of kings, discourse is awakening disgust and spilling across the land. Heaven help us if it doesn't.
When did we lose track of the preservation of intangible natural resources in favor of short sales to extractive industries, declaring the value of public land, and with it, public trust, at next to nothing?
How do we justify subsidizing oil and gas industries while defunding environmental protection, public health and education, then stand by a president who gloats that he hasn't paid taxes for years? How can we tax our people when our president refuses to pay his taxes, or even show them?
Why would we send men into the earth to breathe coal dust and die of black lung disease? The only compensation my grandfather ever received from a career as a coal miner was a death sentence. Miners asthma has destroyed the lungs and lives of men since coal mining began nearly 5,000 years ago. A horrible way to die a slow death, the mortality rates have nearly doubled in the past decade from New York state to Mississippi. Detailed plans to retrain miners for the new economy have persistently been rejected by industry-funded politicians who choose to ignore the fact that solar-energy production alone now employs more workers than coal, oil and natural gas combined.
Why poison water and wildlife with oil spills and mercury? Why destabilize land and trigger earthquakes with fracking? Why release toxins into the atmosphere, hastening the demise of glacial ice caps, while wreaking climate havoc? Why, why, why, when we have a limitless supply of free energy courtesy of Mother Nature staring us in the face every day?
Despite (or perhaps because of) severe fossil-fuel pollution, China has aggressively moved to become the world's leading producer of solar power, committing $364 billion to renewable infrastructure over the next three years. All this while the U.S. president, controlling party and appointees order entire departments to end research and dissemination of scientific studies, a veritable death sentence for progress. No wonder progressives are apoplectic.
Meanwhile, we have a vice president who believes in Noah's Ark but doesn't believe in climate change.
Today I look back with age, perspective and pride on a career as an ethical journalist and founder of two benevolent nonprofit groups. I'm bullish on social networking but find those who break down the respect for evidence a deeply corrosive force undermining democracy and humanity.
Since when is the free press, key to our First Amendment, public education and cornerstone of any democracy, "the enemy of the people"? Journalists aren't here to be complicit in the service of a divisive, obfuscating president, his cohorts and sycophants. Blocking press access treads on sacred ground. This president brands and bans objective journalists with proven track records of fact-based, hysteria-free reporting, then takes questions from known racists, subjective misogynists, xenophobes and screaming "anchors" of talk shows designed specifically to support partisan agendas.
We live in a country built on the backs of what used to be a healthy, educated middle class. United, our surplus of wealth and know-how can easily bank a solid education for everyone, not just to get a better job, to get a better brain. Not only for the privileged, education is a fundamental human right essential for the exercise of all other human rights. And our health depends on the protection of soil, air and water. Human rights and environmental protection are no place for compromise.
So why abide the takeover of our world by a tiny percentage of oligarchs? Is the short-term profit for so few worth more than long-term health for the many who compose our nation's backbone?
Come back, America. Stand up and speak out! Silence is tantamount to selling this country outright. It is our civic duty to vote, to come together and expose wrongdoing, to hold our leaders and controlling special interests accountable, to change systems from within and from our homes, in town halls and in the streets.
Pepper Provenzano, the founder of TreeUtah and TreeLink, was an editor at The Salt Lake Tribune from 1980 to 2000. He lives and writes in Utah and Arizona.