While Rome (and Most Everywhere Else) Burns
by Mel Gurtov
1068 words
By now we’re accustomed to learning that every year brings record high temperatures around the world. Extreme weather, says Prof. Michael Mannof Pennsylvania State University, “is the face of climate change. We literally would not have seen these extremes in the absence of climate change. The impacts of climate change are no longer subtle. We are seeing them play out in real time and what is happening this summer is a perfect example of that. We are seeing our predictions come true. As a scientist that is reassuring, but as a citizen of planet Earth, it is very distressing to see that as it means we have not taken the necessary action.”
Ordinary folks, rich and poor, who live in low-lying areas such as port cities and towns on rivers and coastlines, and in certain forested areas, are in increasing danger of losing their homes—and possibly their lives—to floods and fires. But members of the governing and business elite always have the option to move away from flood and fire zones, not to mention pollution and hurricanes. So where’s their incentive to think ahead and about others’ wellbeing? They need to be called to account!
Climate change, Michael Mann explained, may not be the direct cause of every single weather event. But it raises the risk of disaster by as much as two-fold, and every such disaster adds to the possibility of ecosystem collapse. Just in the last few months we have more bad newsin which climate change plays a part: loss of a near-record 39 million acres of tropical forests in 2017, and a tripling of Antarctic ice sheet lossover the last decade compared with the previous one.
Every world leader who shrinks from directly addressing this situation through public and international policy is, to my mind, guilty of a crime against humanity. A harsh judgment? As I read scientists’ reports about just how fast the polar ice caps are melting, how quickly seas are rising, and how temperatures worldwide are making new records, I conclude that worsening environmental conditions are outrunning both scientific predictions and the ability to act in time. Inaction in such dire circumstances is inexcusable, and should be punishable, on behalf of humanity.
The Trump administration is taking action, but in precisely the wrong direction. Adding to its horrendous record on the environment, the administration is pushing a plan to roll back Obama-era regulations on car and truck tailpipe emissions, which account for as much as 60 percent of carbon dioxide pollution in the US. Even car makers, concerned about the bottom line, are reportedly opposed to the extent of the proposed rollback of emission standards. But once again, it will be up to local-level resistance if this fight is to be won—our environmental and legal organizations and especially state governments like California’s that are determined to maintain tough (tougher even than Obama’s) carbon limits. In fact, California is on trackto meet its legal commitment to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by 2020. That’s the kind of leadership we should follow.*
------
*And within hours of writing that, 18 other states reported that they would sue the administration to stop the rollback.
--end--
Mel Gurtov, syndicated by PeaceVoice, is Professor Emeritus of Political Science at Portland State University.
=================
Sports cars, off-road racing and karting…how much fun can you stand?
Pirelli World Challenge Championship
Utah’s biggest and most exciting sports car event of the year! Lamborghinis, Ferraris, McLarens, Bentleys, Porsches, Audis, Mercedes – all your dream cars on track at the same time! Don’t miss it!
Click for Pirelli World Challenge Info / Tix
Lucas Oil Off Road Racing at Night
First time under the lights for the big 900hp trucks! These guys were feisty enough in the daytime; we can’t wait to see the on-track fireworks! Get your tickets now and make your neighbors jealous!
Click for Lucas Oil Off Road Info / Tix
We’ve got some cool discounts for the hot summer at the UMC Kart Center! Family Night on Mondays, Ladies Night on Thursdays and Date Night on Fridays, plus a Military Discount for our awesome service members! Come on; let’s go racing!
Our friends at Rodizio Grill say you need to come and check out the best Brazilian food in Utah, right here at the track. They’re right!
Keep up with everything that’s happening at UMC! Sign up for our newsletters or follow us on Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat or Twitter.
=================
'The Cummington Story
By Richie Davis
583 words
The little red house in the hilltown of Cummington, Mass. (pop. 800) sits not far along Main Street from the town’s historical museum, which marks its 50th anniversary this summer with continuous Saturday showings of a 1945 U.S. government documentary about a proud moment that echoes today.
It was in that house, as depicted in “The Cummington Story,” that many of the 44 World War II refugees who found sanctuary in this western Massachusetts community stayed between 1940 and 1944.
The 20-minute U.S. Overseas War Information Bureau film (https://archive.org/details/gov.archives.arc.46921), which was translated into 20 languages, dramatizes the temporary haven the Rev. Carl Sangree offered for German and Austrian refugees through the General Council of Congregational Christian Churches.
The Yankee townsfolk, at first suspicious of who these foreigners were and why they’d traveled on a Greyhound bus to the picturesque New England village, felt the strangers — many of them artists, craftspeople and literary figures who were political refugees or part of mixed religion couples who fell through the cracks of other other assistance programs — couldn’t be trusted.
But the strangers, who used their stay at the makeshift hostel— a dozen at a time — to retool their skills to find their way to new lives, won over the locals by their hard work.
The film was part of a series the U.S. government used to be shown in recently liberated Europe to counteract enemy propaganda and show the value of democratic institutions, from a New England town meeting to the freedom of religious expression.
Yet “The Cummington Story” also hints at some of the tensions the foreigners experienced, with some villagers — believing they were spies — even threatening to shoot them. They were confined to their rooms during a quarantine imposed after the nation declared war on Japan in 1941.
Tensions seem to melt away by the film's end through a kind of “occupational therapy” of these strangers honing their skills and taking part in village life in a way that helps both groups feel more comfortable with one another.
“I've always felt the strangeness between people breaks down when they live and work and meet together as neighbors,” says Sangree, who serves as narrator of the film, and who himself was suspect because he played basketball on Sundays amid the ‘Puritan' people of Cummington.
The Cummington story of today is of a small town that still struggles decades after the region’s manufacturing base as well as its dairy farms were lost. Even its elementary school recently shut down.
Yet what remains is a pride in this town, which was home to two U.S. poets laureate over the past 50 years and was also the home of poet and New York Post publisher William Cullen Bryant, a prime supporter of Abraham Lincoln’s presidential ambitions.
Some of its new residents any of the newer residents may hardly be aware of Sangree and the refugees he helped here, says the Rev. Stephen Philbrick, pastor of one of the tiny town’s two Congregational churches, whose wife is Sangree’s granddaughter.
“People are passionate here about a lot of things,” says Philbrick, a standard bearer at the 15-year-old weekly peace vigil in front of the Bryant homestead to champion a variety of causes, including the latest crackdown on immigration.
Pride, and a sense of social justice, run deep in Cummington, as the continuous showing of the 1945 film demonstrates, in part because of its role in offering refuge to foreigners who turned to America for help in starting a new life.
—30—
Richie Davis, distributed by PeaceVoice, is an award-winning journalist with 45 years experience whose reporting from Kentucky was supported by the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.
