Number one Sun, go to your room for your Oct. 8 headline “New analysis suggests national debt could increase under Harris, but it would surge under Trump”. Your leading with a maybe negative Harris followed by and oh, by the way disaster with Trump. That’s backwards. Trump’s budget-busting billionaire rewards while Harris could or could not balance the budget help for the other 99%. Biased media beyond Murdoch’s Fox and Wall Street Journal and Musk’s X bleeding into blue Rhode Island blue, Westerly too. What the heck? Isn’t the lead campaign issue how a lying, convicted felon many times over can be eligible to run for office? We’ve evolved to learn dementia is a scientific disease that befalls the aged, with senility no longer a blanket dismissal. Trump’s breaking new ground that demands presidential office fitness not limited to physical health (tax returns?) as his mental acuity suggests this candidate’s mental fitness every bit as pertinent. Of course mental fitness never entered any constitutional consciousness, with no sane mind imagining anyone progressing so far with so little, but that is the Trump miracle, the Trump media obsession, as you guys ceaselessly try to apply logic to the illogical with no scroll roll long enough to cover the lies, hypocrisy, bankruptcies and failures of Trump’s past. A god among men.
Beyond our budget imbalancing act, our environmental devastation’s a more critical concern. Let’s be clear: “Environment” is not a comprehensive catchall, but as we threaten so many individual strands upholding our existence, it’s a complex network as critical “nature” and biodiversity prospers or deteriorates based on the collective human imprint. Take the chicken, please, said this vegetarian: Chickens currently outnumber humans, with over 33 billion chickens alive today according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN. That’s 33 billion mouths to feed, lungs to breathe and lives to bleed, with all actions requiring energy. Our human impact on this world is changing the climate, which is changing our ability care for ourselves and care for the Earth’s ability to provide the basic necessities of life for an ever-increasing population. Prior to the 1776 Declaration of Independence starting our great country, societies existed to serve the will of the king as powerless, ignorant humans existed in a world lacking information and communication. Kamala Harris’ campaign call “We’re not Going Back” echoes across many channels as the obsessed-with-the-past opposition promises to “Take America Back.” Well, in 2024 we have the information and communication to resist going backwards. Let’s do it indeed.
Election Day is roughly two weeks from now with only two choices. But if you consider the founding fathers’ meaning and the intentions of Rhode Island’s creation to provide freedom from tyranny, opportunity for the dedicated willing to hard work for it and no preference to those born into advantage, there’s only one choice: Kamala Harris, whose success is because of her character, not in spite of it.
Jay Lustgarten
Westerly