Dumbing Way Down

A RECENT SURVEY reveals that fully seventy percent of registered Republicans believe that climate change is eithr a monor threat, or no threat at all. Of te seventy percent, a majority believe that climate change is a hozx perpetrated by liberals as an excuse to implement government control over the economy. Incredible that this is, it gets worse. These people are in the majority in the U.S. House of Representatives. There is a far right group in the House which calls itself the "freedom caucus", and an even more far right group of extremists which calls itself "the twenty". These are the people who derail meaningful legislation fo address global warming, the cause of carbon based climate change. The most rudimentary knowledge of chemistry is sufficient to understand that one thousand billion tons of carbon injected into the atmosphere, and left to remain there, will trap heat from solar radiation, and cause the climate to change. This has been understood for decades, indeed, centuries. Two hundred years ago at least one scientist, witnessing the black soot inundated skies of European cities, sounded the first warning. In most places in the world one need only step outside to notice the difference. For two decades the U.S. Department of Defense has identified human caused climate change as the single greatest threat to national security, as naval bases and many other military installations begin to be flooded with rising sea levels. And yet,America's conservative community continues to deny reality.Instead of addressing what is already becoming the disastrous impact of cimate change, instead of addressing hunger, poverty, grotesque economic inequality and instability, the conservative congressional caucus is embarked on an irrational crusade to remake American society in its own right wing extremist image, a crusade which will inevitably fail, because the American people are rejecting it. With desperate futility consrvative political leaders, bolstered by their reactionary support base, seek to limit indiviaual bodily reproductive autonomy, to limit LGBTQ rights, to embed their religion into American government, and to install in America's public schools idiotic notions, such as the laughable idea that enslaved people benefittd by their own enslavement. Ignoring existential problems which threaten all life on Earth, they fatuously hammer at the edges of American society, trying to stop and reverse social progress. We the American people deserve nothing better than the politicians and the folly for which we vote.