The Trump Years
Since I take the long view, I know that time can march backward. Just ask the graptolites. Oh, sorry, actually you can’t.
Graptolites were tiny sea creatures that once lived in colonies huddled at the bottom of oceans or floating like ribbons of seaweed on the water’s surface. For nearly 200 million years, they prospered in their aquatic world. They probably thought — if they thought at all — that such longevity guaranteed them eternal life on this planet. Then came the Carboniferous Period and a brief but severe ice age. Poof, the graptolites were gone, along with 86% of all other species.
Before evolution culminated in its most glorious and destructive creation — and you know just who I mean — the planet experienced five mass extinctions. The most devastating came at the end of the Permian era, around 250 million years ago, when 96% of all species died out because a huge volcano exploding in present-day Siberia set off a chain reaction that raised the temperature of the seas radically. All of those long-gone creatures left behind no more than a few marks on stone or some petro-carbon pools beneath the Earth’s surface.
The essential law of evolution is the survival of the fittest. Many species die out thanks to some spectacular event or other: an asteroid crashing into the Earth, say, or a massive volcanic eruption. But no wrathful god or malevolent alien force proved necessary for human beings: we were quite capable of being our own worst cataclysm. In an instant of geologic time, we heedlessly burned through our natural resources, while creating weapons of mass destruction that could do in the world hundreds of times over. And then, in 2016, roughly half the voting population of the United States walked into the polls and pulled the lever for doomsday.
My ex-husband loved to regale me with comparable stories from history — of empires that rose and fell, great civilizations that left behind not much more than the poor graptolites had. He believed, however, that the Enlightenment had fundamentally changed human consciousness, that history thereafter was slated to move forward, with only a few stutter steps, into a radiant future. The election of 2016 changed him and his thinking on such subjects irrevocably.
Definition of a pessimist: an optimist mugged by current events.
I, too, didn’t quite realize how quickly a country could move backward, dragging the world with it. I watched helplessly as the Trump administration toppled one scientific enterprise after another, like a sullen child kicking over the sand castles of other kids. As soon as he took office, the new president green-lighted every dirty energy project within reach. Over the objections of environmentalists, scientists, and anyone with a modicum of common sense, his administration boosted a dying coal industry, lifted regulations on carbon emissions, opened up federal land to drilling and fracking, and okayed pipelines that pumped out yet more oil and gas to turn into carbon emissions and further heat the planet. It was the equivalent of a second Industrial Revolution in Saudi America, at the very moment when the planet could ill afford another fossil fuel spree.
Worse yet was the new administration’s decidedly lukewarm attitude toward the Paris Accord on climate change. Even as the president revised his earlier contention that global warming was a Chinese hoax, the United States turned its back on its pledge to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in concert with the other industrialized powers. It also stopped all payments to other countries to help them reduce such emissions. In the space of months, years of patient negotiations unraveled.
The Trump energy stimulus — along with tax cuts for the wealthy, military budget increases, and a major, privatizing infrastructure program — provided a short-term boost to the American economy. It was like giving an exhausted worker a hit of meth. Even then, it hardly took an Einstein to know that what goes up must inevitably come down. The new president’s “plan” threw the American economy into even more serious debt, and the initial spike in employment it caused — the new jobs in mining, pumping, fracking, and building — proved unsustainable, even as an already yawning gap between rich and poor continued to widen. The global economy responded by sliding into stagnation (and then worse), while the positive effects of the short-term stimulus in the United States soon evaporated.
Perhaps if there had been more resistance to the Trump juggernaut, we wouldn’t find ourselves in the present situation. Most critics saw the new president as only a variation, however strange, on all-American themes. They acted as if the normal melody of politics was continuing to play. They ignored the growing cacophony in the country and the world. They simply didn’t see the true nature of the threat.
They didn’t understand how fracked we all were.
Of course, we did finally stop fracking — the pumping of high-pressure liquid under the ground to extract otherwise hard-to-get hydrocarbons — once we fully understood more than two decades ago the devastating consequences it had for the environment and for us. But by then it was too late. Donald Trump had already fulfilled his promise to get at those hidden reserves of oil and gas. In doing so, he ensured that yet more rounds of carbon emissions would head into the atmosphere, unleashing a wave of destructive force that widened the existing cracks in American society.
It’s no surprise that the world began to splinter. But I don’t want to cover the ground my ex-husband has already explored. I have my own story to tell.
From Reconstruction to Deconstruction
Here in this Vermont community where I’ve lived for the past quarter century, I’ve had a lot of time to read. I no longer take ice core samples. There isn’t much point (or much ice left either). Instead, we survive as best we can, while bracing for yet another tempo shift that will force us to measure our lives not in decades but in years, or even days.
We have a good library here in Arcadia, assembled from the basements and attics of farmhouses in the area. No one reads books anymore, so we had our pick. In addition to taking charge of the greenhouses in our community, I teach science in our school. In the evenings, when I have the time, I also read history. For all those years we were together, I listened to my husband’s take on the world of the past. Now I’ve developed my own interpretation.
From my reading, I think I understand what happened to the United States in the aftermath of Hurricane Donald. I think I know now why the country cracked into so many pieces. At the time, I believed it was because of the political divisions of the day, the disagreements over immigration and guns and trade. I didn’t realize that all of these disputes stemmed from a much older conflict built into the very foundations of this country.
Like most Americans, I assumed that our forefathers beat the British in the Revolutionary War and, in short order, created a new experiment in democracy. I’d forgotten — or never even knew — that a decentralized group of not-so-united states existed for six years between the end of that war and the Constitutional Convention of 1787. In those years, the 13 states that had agreed to the Articles of Confederation were quite interested in forming a more perfect union. They evidently liked their status and felt resistant to replacing an imperial overlord with a federal one. Only through a sleight of hand did the founding fathers conjure up an American federation. It was a brilliant piece of politics, but Washington, Hamilton, Madison, and the others never fully convinced those skeptical of federation.
No comments yet.