RE: DIVIDED WE FALL - OUR FAILURE AS CITIZENS, AS MANIFESTED BY THE ELECTION - PLUS A FEW THOUGHTS TO CONSIDER AS WE MOVE FORWARD FROM HERE
The election of a president is not only about the individual at the top of the ticket. It's about hundreds and hundreds of political appointments within federal agencies that conduct the people's business. We're a nation of over 300 million people covering almost 4 million square miles -- there's a lot to deal with. Whatever we think about the top of the ticket, it's the people they bring with them to do that business that has real impact on our lives. I watch for the party platforms, policy plans, and personnel prospects, not just the personality of a candidate. While everyone will be focused on Trump, I expect we will see political appointees within agencies dismantling the protections of our public lands, water quality, air quality, labor laws, food and drug safety, reproductive rights, and voting rights, while Congress gives tax cuts to corporations and the wealthiest.
"protections of our water and air quality" They are spraying us with pesticides and putting fluoride in our water. It can't get any worse.
My understanding is that community governments or individual utilities decide whether their water supplies are treated with fluoride, depending on whether the water provider is a public or private utility. The federal government, through EPA, just requires that the utilities provide their customers with an annual report about what's in their water. The state government decides whether those reports are forwarded to the federal level. You can check whether your utility puts fluoride in your water at this site from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention: here. I can see that in my county, only 1 out of 69 utilities puts fluoride in their water.
Pesticides are sprayed by a lot of folks - federal, state, local, and private. Where I live, people got the local government to stop spraying public lands. Now the county transportation department uses goats to control some of the noxious weeds. None of that was federal.
And yes, it can get worse. It has been worse . If we had the same automobile emissions as we had in the 1960s, our air quality would be a lot worse. It takes a lot of effort to keep getting better.
Way to stay optimistic about it!
That's the spirit, don't let them bring you down!
Pollyanna, optimist, pragmatist, realist, pessimist, nihilist. I'm a gardener, so my natural tendency is an optimist. But then, the first thing I ever mail-ordered as a kid was the US Army book on Survival, Evasion, and Escape, so I've have pessimist tendencies, too. In my working life, I'm a realist and pragmatist in trying to ensure that people have good, quality water or are prepared for floods and drought. This week has been busy in making adjustments in strategies and tactics -- and that's just the start for the next few months, at least. I may not be optimistic, but at least I am, and will be, still working to make things better. And that means working with people of all stripes. But this election does have consequences.
I try not to be a pollyanna and think things will take care of themselves - some things don't. It takes real people doing real work. Like my grandmother used to say, "God may plant the flowers, but somebody's got to pull the weeds". I try not to be a nihilist and just say it's all just too messed up to bother with, let it crash. I think too many vulnerable people get hurt that way.
Politics is ugly and nasty because it's about control of power to make things happen -- we see that in tiny ways even about the direction and progress of Steemit. But it's less ugly and less nasty than making things happen by fascism, feudalism, or war - whether local, international, or anything in-between.