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| Photo Wendy Lynne Lee, 2015 |
To the editor:
It’s telling that the vote in the
UK to leave the European Union is followed by calls for referenda elsewhere by
nationalist, unfailingly far-right parties like France's National Front. Like our
own "America First" pathology incarnated as Donald Trump, these
“movements” pretend to be populist uprisings in defense of the working classes,
but are in fact opportunistic exploitations of racist and xenophobic
hornswaggle that, wrapped in the flag, suckers folks into voting not only against
their own best interests but for a world that better resembles Game of Thrones than anything we’d want
to leave to our kids.
Then again, it’s not the Trumpster’s kids who’ll get
their legs blown off in the next war—it’s yours.
In the face of unprecedented
human migration, 65.3 million women, men, and children in 2015, decisions like
BREXIT and the emergence of the ugly face of nationalist bigotry in the U.S., make it clear that the geopolitics of the planet are driven not by thoughtful
deliberation, but by exploitable fear.
To think that closing borders and building
walls will protect us from terrorism is daft. Indeed, quite the opposite
is likely to be true in virtue of the fact that a world characterized by
divided and competing fiefdoms, turf devoted only to their own version of “My
country right or wrong!” is a world made very brittle by its own arrogant
medieval territorialism.
The tremendous and sad irony of BREXIT,
Trumpster-mania, and all forms of xenophobia is that none will have the
slightest mitigating effect on the threat that endangers human life, indeed,
all life, the most: climate change. We
wring our hands over ISIS, all the while failing to see its biggest driver
isn’t the religion that smug born-agains like Mr. Trump love to demonize; it’s
the drought, flooding, loss of arable land, and lack of potable water caused by
a human hubris that pours greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere as if the
planet’s capacity to recover is limitless. It’s the desperation that makes young
men ripe for recruitment to their own religion’s version of self-righteous
hatred.
It’s the same staggering callousness to the lives of others that
excuses the moral depravity of four Southern Columbia football jocks who beat
animals to death for fun. Indeed, if we think that these upstanding young men
are any different that the young bucks recruited by ISIS, we’re both blind and
stupid. Both have been taught the appalling lesson that some life has value,
and other does not.
Is it apples and oranges to
compare a local story with international events? Hardly. What torturing
nonhuman animals, demonizing “others,” sealing borders, and building moronic
walls all have in common is a human chauvinism whose psychotic sense of
unearned entitlement is going to burn the planet down—or, well, not the planet—just
the ecological and existential conditions that make living worth the struggle.
Laughable it is that we’ll risk even speedier dissent into 500 PPB just to drill
the hydrocarbons we need to fuel the weapons of “the war on terror,” and in so
doing create the conditions of more terrorism.
Make no mistake about it: that
lethal combination of arrogance and willful ignorance that excuses beating
animals to death is not one whit different manifest as racism, misogyny,
homophobia, religious intolerance, and bigoted nationalism. Exploited by those
like Donald Trump or Boris Johnson to advance their own egomaniacal agendas,
the ends are all the same: violence, suffering, and oppression meted out by
those who think they have the right to make of “others” objects for their own
use.
Wendy
Lynne Lee
Lightstreet, PA
590
words.
