People rally as they take part in a protest against Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump in New York on March 19,2016. (Photo: Kena Betancur/AFP/Getty)
Jun 06, 2017
Dear Donald Trump:
I write this short note to you shortly after you have moved to cancel participation of the United States in the Paris Climate Accord. I know that many believe you are a stumbling, bumbling narcissist who does not think deeply about anything but himself and the mood of the base he is so eager to maintain. But I see things just a bit differently.
I suspect you now know full well that climate change is real and is accelerating. Perhaps you even welcome the fascist pressures that are apt to intensify as expanding droughts, glacier melts, rising oceans, stressed water supplies, power outages, extreme storms, ocean acidification, and refugee pressures grow. Perhaps you think that rich people like you can escape the consequences, as large zones of the world are progressively decimated. I am not sure. But it would not surprise me. What some see as a blind tendency to stumble into huge blunders I see as a kind of aggressive nihilism that is much more primed to stumble in some directions than others.
If such an assumption is on the right track, it makes no sense to appeal to you or to try to influence your thinking. You have gone over the edge. It makes the most sense to link protests against your destructive actions at home and abroad to a host of voluntarist actions in localities, schools, universities, churches, universities, corporations and other countries to alter the norms of consumption, to shift the power grid, and to enliven one another. For we know that several zones in the world and inside the United States already feel the results of your destructive mentality and will do so much more in the short term future. We will do our best to hold you accountable for this, as we show as many poor people, working class people, and minorities as possible what destruction your policies are wreaking now and will wreak on their children. Nihilism, of course, is not far away from the pursuit of Fascism.
From this day on you and your ilk have become people to oppose and expose, not to try to convince. We will do the best we can to separate you from your base and to help them to see the con job you have fed them, even as we work more actively upon ourselves to appreciate better than we have in the past the real grievances that propelled so many to take a fateful shot in the dark with you...
Sincerely,
William E. Connolly
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William E. Connolly
William E. Connolly is the Krieger-Eisenhower Professor of Political Science at Johns Hopkins University. One of his recent books is "Facing the Planetary: Entangled Humanism and the Politics of Swarming" (Duke, 2017)
Dear Donald Trump:
I write this short note to you shortly after you have moved to cancel participation of the United States in the Paris Climate Accord. I know that many believe you are a stumbling, bumbling narcissist who does not think deeply about anything but himself and the mood of the base he is so eager to maintain. But I see things just a bit differently.
I suspect you now know full well that climate change is real and is accelerating. Perhaps you even welcome the fascist pressures that are apt to intensify as expanding droughts, glacier melts, rising oceans, stressed water supplies, power outages, extreme storms, ocean acidification, and refugee pressures grow. Perhaps you think that rich people like you can escape the consequences, as large zones of the world are progressively decimated. I am not sure. But it would not surprise me. What some see as a blind tendency to stumble into huge blunders I see as a kind of aggressive nihilism that is much more primed to stumble in some directions than others.
If such an assumption is on the right track, it makes no sense to appeal to you or to try to influence your thinking. You have gone over the edge. It makes the most sense to link protests against your destructive actions at home and abroad to a host of voluntarist actions in localities, schools, universities, churches, universities, corporations and other countries to alter the norms of consumption, to shift the power grid, and to enliven one another. For we know that several zones in the world and inside the United States already feel the results of your destructive mentality and will do so much more in the short term future. We will do our best to hold you accountable for this, as we show as many poor people, working class people, and minorities as possible what destruction your policies are wreaking now and will wreak on their children. Nihilism, of course, is not far away from the pursuit of Fascism.
From this day on you and your ilk have become people to oppose and expose, not to try to convince. We will do the best we can to separate you from your base and to help them to see the con job you have fed them, even as we work more actively upon ourselves to appreciate better than we have in the past the real grievances that propelled so many to take a fateful shot in the dark with you...
Sincerely,
William E. Connolly
William E. Connolly
William E. Connolly is the Krieger-Eisenhower Professor of Political Science at Johns Hopkins University. One of his recent books is "Facing the Planetary: Entangled Humanism and the Politics of Swarming" (Duke, 2017)
Dear Donald Trump:
I write this short note to you shortly after you have moved to cancel participation of the United States in the Paris Climate Accord. I know that many believe you are a stumbling, bumbling narcissist who does not think deeply about anything but himself and the mood of the base he is so eager to maintain. But I see things just a bit differently.
I suspect you now know full well that climate change is real and is accelerating. Perhaps you even welcome the fascist pressures that are apt to intensify as expanding droughts, glacier melts, rising oceans, stressed water supplies, power outages, extreme storms, ocean acidification, and refugee pressures grow. Perhaps you think that rich people like you can escape the consequences, as large zones of the world are progressively decimated. I am not sure. But it would not surprise me. What some see as a blind tendency to stumble into huge blunders I see as a kind of aggressive nihilism that is much more primed to stumble in some directions than others.
If such an assumption is on the right track, it makes no sense to appeal to you or to try to influence your thinking. You have gone over the edge. It makes the most sense to link protests against your destructive actions at home and abroad to a host of voluntarist actions in localities, schools, universities, churches, universities, corporations and other countries to alter the norms of consumption, to shift the power grid, and to enliven one another. For we know that several zones in the world and inside the United States already feel the results of your destructive mentality and will do so much more in the short term future. We will do our best to hold you accountable for this, as we show as many poor people, working class people, and minorities as possible what destruction your policies are wreaking now and will wreak on their children. Nihilism, of course, is not far away from the pursuit of Fascism.
From this day on you and your ilk have become people to oppose and expose, not to try to convince. We will do the best we can to separate you from your base and to help them to see the con job you have fed them, even as we work more actively upon ourselves to appreciate better than we have in the past the real grievances that propelled so many to take a fateful shot in the dark with you...
Sincerely,
William E. Connolly
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