Three cheers for Richard Brunswick’s comprehensive guest column in the July 9 edition of the Gazette. Recalling the 1956 claim of Soviet leader Khrushchev that “We will bury you,” Brunswick asks, in effect, if we might be burying ourselves. He describes a host of failures by the Trump administration, as well as its manifest preference for Vladimir Putin’s Russia over America’s traditional allies and the brave Ukrainians. Trump is pushing the U.S. into decline.
I would add just one thing to Brunswick’s admirable piece: climate change. Those who deny its reality by now must truly have their heads buried deep in the ever more scorching sands. Our planet is now hotter than at any other point in human history. The culprit is carbon in the atmosphere, the producers of carbon are we ourselves. So what is the Trump administration doing to combat it? Nothing. Indeed, it is pursuing policies — canceling clean energy projects left and right, encouraging the use of coal (the worst polluting fuel in general use), etc. — that will accelerate global warming. If you like the “heat domes” that have been afflicting the northern hemisphere in recent months, then Donald Trump is your guy.
We are like frogs in water that is gradually getting hotter. Will we wake up before it is too late?
John M. Connolly
Williamsburg