Month 11, Day 7: Sunday POTUS

The concert went off well; I’m back at home and decompressing from a fabulous evening of drumming. I’ll have photos online within a day and video/audio soon after that.

Meanwhile, my letter to President Obama:

Dear President Obama,

As a Massachusetts resident, I am proud of my own state’s results in the recent midterm election. I was a teenager when we were the only state to support George McGovern in 1972, and I’d like to think that we continue to recognize the value of progressive politics and policies (several Republican governors and the recently elected Scott Brown notwithstanding). About the rest of the country, I’m pretty depressed.

In particular, I find the election of so many “climate zombies” to be a terrible blow. In case you’re unfamiliar with the term, it refers to a politician whose ideologically driven rejection of the facts of global climate change remains impervious to any and all scientific evidence. These people got elected, and they are going to do their best to stop all progress on combating global warming over the next two years.

They must not succeed. While on a philosophical level I applaud your bipartisan instincts and your readiness to compromise, this is one issue where that can’t be allowed to happen. Because the ultimate conflict is not between Republicans and Democrats, or conservatives and liberals — it is between the forces of human ignorance and the terrifying facts of the greenhouse effect, and in this theater, there can be no bipartisanship.

I’m a progressive liberal, and I worked hard to get you elected. I’m one of those voters that makes up your “base.” It was pretty clear when I was phonebanking during this election that your base (all those liberals all over the country) weren’t happy about the way things were going in your administration. Over and over again, people said there had been too many compromises on the wrong sorts of issues, and too many missed opportunities to show strong leadership. Well, this is a chance to lead strongly.

Climate change is the defining issue of our time; our handling of this will determine whether our descendants praise us or revile us, or indeed whether our descendants remain alive on Earth at all. Mother Nature won’t compromise; it’s her way or the highway. There can be no bargaining with big oil and big coal; their moral credibility is in the negative numbers, and if you compromise with these forces, your moral credibility will be dragged down with them.

Don’t do it. Please. We need you.

Yours Sincerely,

Warren Senders