“No one can survive in this world without help. No one.”
~ Ser Jorah Mormont, Game of Thrones
On the the night that Donald Trump was elected, I went to sleep feeling like my insides had been carved out. I was stunned. Shaken. Despondent.
The next day I woke up more clear-eyed. It was clarifying to have an enemy. I’d prefer an opponent but so we had it. I sent some email messages, texts to friends, family, and colleagues.
“Game on. We want a just, sane, and sustainable world? Then we are the ones who are going to do it.”
How did the guy who Jeb Bush called a chaos candidate become the president? How could a man who courted the white supremacist alt-right and was endorsed by the Daily Stormer become the leader of all Americans? How could a guy so uninformed that he couldn’t name the nuclear triad or provide any detail about any policy or a fact about anything be entrusted to make an informed decision about anything? How could a guy who said he was going to bring back coal jobs also cheer on natural gas which is kicking the snot out of coal be taken seriously? A guy who was an admitted sexual predator? A climate denier? A guy who’d bankrupted his own businesses, cheated contractors, ran a fake university, and whose self obsession knew no ends? A guy who didn’t win the popular vote by 3 million votes.
Yeah yeah. I’m an outraged progressive. As a Sanders delegate who’d joined the Democratic Party only to run for office, I was already used to disappointment. But it’s so much more than that.
I was, and remain, an outraged professional and citizen. Like most of us, I respect knowledge, skill, respect, honesty, patience, and dignity. You know. Things that afford us the ability to live well together. But here we are with the chaos president who used chaos as a ladder turn the government into a seething rat nest of incompetence and sickening greed.
Straight away, we knew Trump was going to create a kakistrocracy–a government of the worst. As Sophia McClennen wrote, there’s “Ben Carson for Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, perhaps one of the weirdest choices given that Carson has no relevant experience and earlier stated he did not want to work in government.” But then Trump and co. trotted out Rick Perry who couldn’t remember that there was a Department of Energy even though he wanted to scrap it. Betsy Devos was uneducated about education and all for it for everyone but rich Christians. Jeff Sessions who started to immediately run the racial injustice department. Then there’s Scott Pruitt and Ryan Zinke at EPA and the Interior who have been nothing short of a winning lottery ticket for the fossil fuel, chemical, mining, and big agriculture industries.
Only “the best people” are nominated for upper-middle positions too. Remember Brett Talley? My god. If the six judicial nominees who ever been spurned by the Bar, four of them have been Trump’s. Sam Clovis, a talk show host with no experience in scientific research was almost appointed to a science advisory position in the Department of Agriculture. Luckily, he stepped away because of his position on the spidering web of the Trump-Russia investigation. And Kathleen Harnett White doesn’t understand that water expands when it warms up and that that’s, you know, part of climate change’s impacts. You don’t have to be a scientist to understand that. You have to have completed 6th or 7th grade.
And let’s not forget greed. Steven Mnuchin is a poster boy for “the most corrupt White House in history.” Trump’s swelling his coffers with endorsements of his Beminster golf club during a speech in South Korea. Doubling down on nepotism and inability, he’s clueless smooth-faced empty-headed son-in-law Jared Kushner in charge of things 5th graders know more about, whether technology or Middle East peace.What’s happened?
It’s a nightmare of corruption that’s dismantling the full faith and trust of our people and our allies in our government. But we are fighting back and moving ahead.
On November 9th, 2016 when I woke up and said, “Game on,” I wasn’t kidding. In the 400+ days since then, I’ve dedicated my work to not just push back, but to make progress. How?
When it became clear that Trump was going to move ahead with a nativist anti-immigrant set of policies, I joined with fellow Council of Government supervisors and council members like Laura Dininni, David Brown, Evan Meyers, and Janet Engemann to adopt a resolution welcoming immigrants and refugees to the Centre Region. We passed a stronger one in Ferguson Township that was made more potent with some of our supervisors’ input, especially Ms. Dininni’s and Rita Graef’s. It explicitly reinforces Constitutional equal protection.
Last June, when Trump decided to pull the United States out of the Paris Agreement, I took two actions. At my job at Penn State, I knew that something had to be done. Penn State had publicly stated that we had to tackle climate change. When the #WeAreStillIn signing statement came to my desk, I passed it onto my boss at Penn State’s Sustainability Institute and had a short follow-up conversation. A couple of days later, President Eric Barron signed on. Just a couple of weeks ago, I was placed on
In Ferguson Township I’m now chair of the board and active as best as I can in our community to fight for a climate drawdown and a vibrant renewable energy economy. Last year Ferguson Township resolved to get the township to net zero emissions by 2050 and set the processes in motion to do it. Our Climate Action Committee is assessing our greenhouse gas impacts and getting some planning in motion. To date we have assessed all township property for solar PV development. We passed a stormwater ordinance that makes us and our development community account and build for increasing peak rain events, events getting more intense as the air and oceans warm. We have a LEED Gold public works building in design that may end up being energy positive with a full rooftop solar array and be a demonstration for high performance. Along with Philly, Pittsburgh, and a few other governments in Pennsylvania, we are also signatories of the We Are Still In campaign.
Along with other community members, I’ve been out and about to bring support for climate action. State College Area School District in its embrace of green buildings. I have worked with my students and advocated that our school board should to put rooftop solar on three new elementary school renovations. They are doing it! Last week our sewer authority held its ribbon-cutting ceremony for its 2.6 megawatt solar array. The 6-acre solar development will provide 32% of the authority’s power, making it the largest solar farm on municipal property in the state. That power is 100% clean, 100% renewable, and 100% local. But the benefits are far-reaching.
It created good local jobs that work for our climate. It also reduces our carbon impacts, doing just that small bit to prevent damage to low-lying island nations and coastal people, the bleaching of corals, prevent wildfires and droughts from California to Australia, and maybe slow and eventually stop the melting of ice caps and sea ice that undermine the lives of the Inuit and the polar bear. In the United States, the more climate-protective we are, the more we support communities of color who suffer most from asthma from power plants. It protects the ancestral lands of Native peoples by keeping us away from the coal seams and gas the fossil fuel industry thinks is their manifest destiny to take. In my heart, the fight for climate change is a fight for the dignity of the weakest, the integrity of my community, and respect for myself. It is the best fight I have in me, however sloppily and imperfectly I do it.
“No one can survive in this world without help. No one,” Ser Jorah Mormont tells Danaerys Targeryen in Game of Thrones. We all need support, inspiration, and love. None of the things I’ve named above happened because “I alone” did something. It happened because the groups, teams, coalitions, consortia, councils, committees, and partners worked for a common vision. It’s about knowing that sometimes you’re out in front and trusted with the reins, other times just listening, and other times cheering on. It’s not easy or without conflict. But it can’t happen alone.
It’s been about a year since Donald Trump took office. I don’t fall asleep feeling like my insides are carved out anymore. Sure, the stakes are higher than they’ve been in my lifetime and I’m still despondent and angry.
But more importantly, I’m in love with this world. I fall asleep knowing that tomorrow I have good people to work with who are fighting and singing and organizing for a more just, verdant, and peaceful world. And each day I wake up energized because I have choices to make about co-creating a better world with you.
To today.
Peter Walks for Democracy 