The Big Picture – 
By Glynn Wilson – 

WASHINGTON, D.C. — If you have an interest in the national seat of power in this broken American democracy, as I do, your path will take you here to the nation’s capital. There’s lots to see and do here.

If you also have an interest in saving this broken planet, as I do, you might consider making a trip here during the week of September 20-27, when some people, especially the young, are planning a week of strikes to bring national and world attention to the problem of climate change due to global warming from the burning of fossil fuels for energy.

See this video, a call to action from Greta Thunberg and people all over the world who are responding to the call to join youth in the streets for the Global Climate Strikes September 20-27.

Maybe this generation of young people can make a big difference. If they don’t, human survival on the planet and this experiment in democracy may be doomed to extinction.

My generation, the Baby Boomers, started fighting these causes back in the 1960s. We made a significant difference.

We even convinced a Republican president, Richard Nixon, to get behind the idea of the need to protect the environment with federal regulations. Nixon created the Environmental Protection Agency, and signed laws to protect the air and water.

But on the democracy front, my generation lost some key battles too.

We allowed the religious right to take over the Republican Party in the 1980s and elect Ronald Reagan, who appointed anti-environment officials like James G. Watt to his cabinet. Since Reagan became such a hero to Republicans and allowed religion, racism and anti-environment sentiment to gain a foothold in our politics, these lessons were not lost on an ambitious real estate tycoon and reality TV star in New York named Donald Trump.

We fought off reelecting Reagan’s Vice President, George H. W. Bush, to a second term in 1992, bringing Arkansas’ Bill Clinton and Tennessee’s Al Gore to the White House. The environmental movement and community was a key part of that effort.

Go back and watch any speech made by Clinton and Gore in the 1990s and notice that the environment was mentioned as one of the main three or four issues of the Clinton administration in every address, along with the economy, jobs and education.

We entered the new millennium in pretty good shape, with a much cleaner environment and no federal deficit to boot. Remember the “peace dividend?”

But then we suffered a major setback. We stood by and let the United States Supreme Court hand the election of 2000 to George W. Bush, who also learned lessons from Reagan and set about to get rid of federal regulations and let the polluting corporations go on the loose with air and water pollution again, as well as the banks. As a result, we came very close to a global depression in 2007-09, so we got fired up and elected the first African American to the White House in 2008 in an optimistic campaign for peace and hope.

While Obama inspired the creation of the tea party movement and the occupy protests, by the end of his second term my generation and others had become complacent and even lazy.

It seemed that no matter how far we stepped back, we could always step forward again and feel sanguine about our democracy and the environment. I admit it. I slept well in the eight years with the Obama family in the White House. We felt like the ship of state needed influencing now and then, but the wheel and the rudder were in pretty good hands.

But we faltered again in 2016, allowing Trump to sneak into the White House with only 46.1 percent of the popular vote. Democrats fought amongst themselves during the primary, and were too divided to join forces to beat Trump in November.

Now look at us.

As the New York Times editorial board pointed out on Sunday, Trump has turned this land over to the miners, loggers and drillers, denying even the science of the federal agencies on climate change and global warming.

The Democrats don’t seem to be as divided in the 2020 election primary season as they were in 2016, but that does not mean they are united, either. There does not seem to be one star candidate who can unite the party in a way that might have a chance to defeat Trump next November.

So now the Amazon rain forest, the lungs of the earth, is being burned down on purpose, and not much is being done to stop it.

And now a category 5 hurricane named Dorian, meaning child of the sea, is barreling toward the coasts of Florida and South Carolina with winds of up to 160 mph. Dorian has swept the burning rain forest off the newspaper front pages and the television news. It’s still burning.

What are the people and the politicians doing? Not much, it seems to me from here, other than running from the scary reality of it all.

So I admit to running too. What else can one man do?

I’ve been exploring the “great escape” route to get away from the worst heat waves in the summer months in the Eastern U.S. I’m considering following this new Mason-Dixon Line west next summer to see where it leads, to the Ozarks in Arkansas to the Rockies in Colorado and points west.

I’ve also studied going even further north to the Poconos to the Adirondacks to the Green Mountains in Vermont. The point is you want to be in the mountains to escape the heat in the summer months, and away from the cities if and when the power grid goes down and the banks fail in Trump’s Great Recession, which seems inevitable unless he is defeated in 2020.

This year, I’ve discovered a rain shadow in the Catoctin Mountains in Maryland, and explored campgrounds all the way through Pennsylvania to the Catskills in New York state. I found the mid-point on the Appalachian Trail and visited the new Museum by the Pine Grove Furnace State Park in the Michaux State Forest.

A hint of autumn is in the air here now, however, so I will be making plans to head back south for the winter soon. But I will be downtown during the week of September 20-27, hoping to see you all there for the protest strikes.

If you can’t make it up here, consider showing up at protests in cities across the country.

We’ve go to do something, and soon, or get ready to say goodbye. I’m not quite ready to give up? You?