The Candidates' Closing Argument (That You Will Never Hear)

On the even of the election, the candidate speaks:

Government does three things. First, it provides stability and security for the present.  It does this year in and year out almost invisibly, but because of government we have the infrastructure of our daily lives, we are protected as much as we can be from crime and foreign attack, we assume our food and water and medicines are safe. Our children go to school, our elderly receive their benefits.

 These days, this role of government is under attack, which is stunning in itself. So I must pledge to see that government has the resources and the tools to provide stability and security, and for some, that will be controversial.

Second, government responds to emergencies that are too big for anyone alone to handle.  In the depths of the Depression, when someone in the FDR government proposed something that would help alleviate unemployment and hunger in the long term,  FDR's advisor Harry Hopkins pointed out, "People don't eat in the long term.  They eat every day."  I pledge to see that government has the resources and tools to respond to emergencies.

Both of these functions are about the present.  There are other aspects of the present in which government has a role--government guarantees that Constitutional and individual rights aren't violated, and that our laws are enforced without prejudice, and without fear or favor.  I support justice and equality, and efforts to promote the general welfare.

But there is a third function of government that never seems to make it into political discussions or political campaigns.  It is government's responsibility to the future.  Today the future is imperiled by global heating and related ecological destruction, such as deforestation and species extinction.  The future this damage is creating is not very far off.  It's already begun.  But we never talk about it.

At best, most candidates mention a catch-phrase or two, or we talk about preserving the beauty of nature, as if that's all that's at stake when the Earth as we know it collapses.

We've had our heads in the sand for years now.  Nobody wants to talk about it, not in any detail, least of all political candidates.  We'd all rather fashion our applause lines out of the issues of the moment.  You can list the issues of the moment for the past twenty elections.  Some will recur, but a lot of them have disappeared.  And none--and I mean none--are going to be as important as the fate of the planet.

The fate of planetary life determines the fate of your children and grandchildren, and of everything we hold dear.  We've known the Earth as it supports us is and has been in peril for at least a generation but we politicians never talk about it, especially at election time.

But what else really should our elections be about?  There's nothing more important.   So I pledge to make the future my overriding concern.  I pledge to talk about the causes and effects of the climate crisis and related problems at every opportunity, and I promise to make these issues my top priority.

When this election is over, candidates for President in 2020 will begin to make their moves.  Whether or not I am elected this year, I pledge to badger every presidential candidate, to demand that they talk in detail about these issues of the future, especially the climate crisis.

We should have done this a long time ago.  We can't hide from it any longer.  We all know that the national attention goes immediately to the latest shiny object.  We've got to insist that the next shiny object is the climate crisis.  Presidential candidates have the forum for getting that started.  Despite whatever credentials on this issue past presidential candidates had, none of them really did this.  We must insist they do this time.

So that's something else I pledge to do if I'm elected.  Or if I'm not.