View From Here

Unprecedented Changes

View From Here
By David Mark Greaves

We are in the beginning of multiple eras in Brooklyn that span the city, nation, and the globe. In the city we have an unprecedented change in political leadership. With most of the city council being women, we’ll see what that female energy and intuitive connections bring to the table in shaping policy in ways both bold and subtle.


Meanwhile, the Republican party is working nationwide to suppress the Black and Brown vote in ways too numerous to list here. Beyond that, they want to empower an entity or official to override the will of the voters, and all of it to win the House of Representatives in 2022 and re-elect Trump in 2024— although I don’t believe a convicted felon can run for president—and bring us into an era of White supremacist mob rule. What a terrible thing to say, and yet it is entirely possible because it is happening at this very moment in legislative actions and with politically placed election officials.


They are plotting a coup in plain sight and the best way to stop them will be for the senate to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Bill. If that passes, depending mostly on the decisions of Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, and Senator Krysten Sinema of Arizona, and all eligible voters are allowed to vote, then we will take a different fork in the road. We will enter an era where the wishes of the masses are no longer ignored. There will be gun control. The tax code will be rewritten so that everyone pays their fair share. There will be a tax on wealth. There will be universal health care, money for education and more, if everyone is allowed to vote. That is the promise to look forward to and it is the fear of it that drives White supremacists, and those profiting from the system as it is, to use any means necessary, including legalized cheating, to prevent the masses of people determining the direction of the nation.


This fighting for the “soul of the nation” couldn’t have come at a worse time for the planet, as we are faced with the truly existential threat of the warming planet and its changing climate.


When it comes to climate change, we’ve caught up to the future when we thought the climate problem would really hit us. Temperatures staying over 100 degrees in the northwest. 115 degrees for four days in the Canadian province of British Columbia. Once in a hundred-year flooding in Germany and a “megadrought” in the American Southwest that is draining reservoirs and which meteorologists say is threatening the existence of cities like Las Vegas, Phoenix and others that depend on the lessening snowmelt to feed their rivers.

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Wildfires in the West and subway flooding in New York that did not come from the sea like before, but from the sky, with the promise of more to come from the warmed oceans evaporating more water, and the warmer air bringing the water to us and raining it into subway grates all over the city.


This is only the beginning of the obvious effects of climate change, and it must be, like Covid-19, a world-unifying crisis.
We are in an era that will be remembered for whatever time we have left as a nation and a species.

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