Trump's War on Nature, Culture, and the Future

I just fired this letter off to the Richmond Times-Dispatch,  But since it is an apt summary of what I find so loathsome about the Trump regime, I am sharing it here, for all to see...

Editor, the Richmond Times-Dispatch:

With the release of his recent draconian budget, Donald Trump has declared war on nature, culture, and the future.

His war on nature takes the form of eliminating funds to protect Appalachian rivers and streams from coal ash, our atmosphere from emissions, our public lands from logging and drilling, and the Chesapeake Bay from pollution. He is also slashing funds for research from the EPA, and reversing Obama’s decisions on highly risky and destructive pipeline projects like the Dakota Access Pipeline and the Keystone XL pipeline.

His war on culture takes the form of eliminating much-needed funding for the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.  All these nonpartisan programs ensure high quality, noncommercial education programs like Sesame Street for our children, the promotion of scientific literacy through programs like NOVA and Nature, and the transmission of our cultural heritage through magnificent, commercial-free programming like the American Experience, Masterpiece Theatre, and Great Performances, all of which are available only from PBS. Trump’s slashing of these cultural enrichment programs will quickly reduce our population to clueless, commercial-saturated morons, easily manipulated by truthless demagogues like himself.

Finally, his war on the future is most visible in his slashing all funding for research into climate change, his abandonment of the historic Paris agreement, and his ignorant pooh-poohing of the international consensus on the threat of climate destabilization through excess CO2 emissions. These actions effectively doom our children to a horrific future of sea-level rise and worldwide ecological collapse—but obviously, Trump does not care.

We cannot hope to educate him, so we all must resist, making our representatives’ tenure in office entirely dependent on their total rejection of Trump’s budget.

Thomas I. Ellis,

Hampton, VA