Thoughts of a retired physician

  The first Earth Day was 22 April 1970 – 53 years ago yesterday. I had just finished my classes at Pitt and was set to graduate in May. I was back in Reading and gathered with friends at a celebration of what my generation (the Boomers) felt to be important because we were helping to save the planet. The world population was estimated to be 3.7 billion and the U.S. population was 203 million . The concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was 325 parts per million . We had not detected a hole in the ozone layer. There were 200 million motor vehicles in the world and 118 million of them were in the United States. How naive we all were in 1970. If one looks at the comparable numbers today, we are an immensely different world. Way more people, way more vehicles, way more carbon dioxide in the air. It wasn’t that we did not recognize what was happening in 1970. It was because it was easier and a lot more fun to go about our business in a manner that not only continued to pol...

  Yesterday in The Bulwark Sarah Longwell noted that we have reached an inflection point. The election of Donald Trump in 2016 was one of those “through the looking glass” moments that mark a different age. There is Before Trump and After Trump. The BT years included a Republican Party that had been formed in the 1850s to protect free labor; led a Civil War that destroyed slavery but did not destroy the racism and white supremacy in which slavery began; became a bastion for business for decades; opposed the New Deal because it was too socialistic for them; and sank into a party of grievances and culture wars as the 20 century’s last decades were closing out. There is, of course, much more history and nuance to the story but the basic shape of the Republican Party today was formed before Barack Obama was elected to the presidency in 2008. Donald Trump was a problematic person long before he ran for the presidency. Loudmouthed, obscene, misogynistic, and sociopathic, he was and is ...