Recently someone (name withheld because I forgot) submitted a letter to this paper that said Trump was trying to do good things for America but was stymied by the actions of liberals. If this is true then I am undereducated. Of the ilk who believe this about our president, I ask for examples of his benevolent wishes in order to augment my understanding of reality. After all, without persuasive examples I tumble helplessly into the belief that such Trump supporters are desperate to defend their deeper conservative philosophies and are struggling for validation. I will flex my ideology to any convincing responses, but, as yet, I lack access to information that might reveal the president’s altruism, be it truth or myth.
I don’t mean to take this lightly; until I am properly convinced otherwise I can only live in fear of the confounding influences of the White House since the Trumps moved in. It is dire, life on Earth is at stake.
Pretending that everyone else doesn’t already know I will list some of the scarier recent presidential directives, only the ones that deal with the future sustenance of life on Earth:
1.He initiated the removal of our country — the only one — from the Paris Climate Agreement that was created to get as many governments as it could to recognize human caused degradation of our planets ability to support life and then agree on measures to address that.
2.Obama’s Clean Power Plan that was to cut carbon emissions got axed because Trump thinks burning lots of coal need not be replaced. It is plenty clean according to that man.
3.The OIAI was dropped leaving polluting companies to design their own standards. The fox is guarding the duck pen.
4.He took the strength out of the rules on fuel economy in spite of some auto producers’ willingness to comply with improved standards in the future.
5.The man narrowed the definition of what’s considered a federally protected body of water thus opening more rivers and wetlands to exploitation by profiteering land developers.
6.The EPA has been reduced to near disfunctionality allowing polluting violators to, once again, set their own standards.
7.This administration has made deregulation a priority. Sounds like the Wild West.
8.The solopsist-in-chief rolled back just about every environmental act protecting wildlife previous to and involving the Obama administration that I haven’t already mentioned.
Look it up: the Harvard Law School and the Columbia Law School have listed more than 80 environmental rules and regulations rolled back or eliminated by our country’s current guard dog at the expense of our grandkids and more.
So please, Trump praisers, educate me. Tell me how his gifts to the world more than compensate for these anti-environment actions. I want to believe that he wants to do good. Convincing me will not be easy.
Sonny Crawford is a resident of Shelburne Falls.