Today was a very scary day for the world. Today our president, Donald Trump, decided to pull out of the 2015 Paris Accord Climate Change resolution. It was actually an exciting prospect with many world nations agreeing to work together on this issue. This bode well for the entire world and gave most of us great cheer.

But today, in one fell swoop, Trump said that US was pulling out. What gives? I thought our political leaders were supposed to represent the people who live in the USA. He sure does not represent me. And he does not represent Pete.

His rationale was that he was doing this because the agreement would have a deleterious effect on the economy. So now there will be a greater reliance on

Arkose Ridge: Our back yard

dirty, smelly, coal, and on hard to find oil. And there will be a lesser reliance on alternative energy. With this greater reliance is going to come more pollution, and with more pollution comes a more unhealthy environment. Trump has also nearly abolished the Environmental Protection Agency, an organization that would oversee environmental hazards and waste.

This makes me think of the snow geese that landed on the Berkeley Pit in Butte, Montana and died. It was a toxic waste pit, full of mine tailings. There was nothing that could be done. We are going to see a lot more of this kind of thing in the next four years. One can only hope that the pendulum, which has swung as far to the right as is possible, will swing back to left as far as is humanly possible.

Why is this man being this way? He is taking great delight in rescinding anything and everything that Obama and other left leaning politicians put into effect. His actions are being made out of spite, not out of concern for the economy. He’s simply saying “I am in power and I can do what I want to do and this is what I am going to do.” He’s the classroom bully, now full grown and on the lam.

Last October I was told that the president really had no power and was just a smokescreen. This I now know is not so. This man has considerable power and is exercising it in the wrong way.

How do we fight this? I don’t think that the answer, as do some of my friends, is to ignore this behavior in hopes that it will go away. No, no, no. We all need to speak up and speak out. It is okay to preach to the choir because this lets others know that we are in solidarity. At the same time, we need to speak of our concerns to those who have differing viewpoints. My sense is that those with differing viewpoints are not news aware. They don’t know just how bad things are getting. When, one day, they can hardly breathe because the air in the city they live in is so polluted, they may wake up. But then it will be too late.

It may already be too late. Hard to say. It was just a sad, sad day.

151. June 2, 2017: Talking to Eleanor