Open letter to Joe Biden, Michael Bloomberg, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren: As your age-mate and a lifelong liberal voter, I ask you to step aside and support a candidate who speaks the language and understands the worries of younger voters. Voters who will outlive us only to suffer unimaginable environmental and social calamity after your candidacy returns Trump and brings us four more years of contempt for human decency and the environment.

Younger voters do not remember Joe McCarthy or Nixon and take lightly the daily lies and insults of Trump. They do know that climate change and sea-level rise will force billions of people to migrate and know today’s stress over a few Central American refugees to be a pimple on our problems.

As an engineer I understand the mathematics of feedback systems and I know our earth has switched to an unstable state. I am appalled that you and front-runners in the Democratic race have shown paltry understanding or interest in the urgency and magnitude of climate change. Nor has it occurred to any of you that the effort to save the environment will make FDR’s Depression-era programs, which raised everyone’s living standards, look like an amateur hour. The necessary programs would create millions of jobs that pay a living wage and cannot be shipped overseas.

Younger generations know our generation is leaving them a wasteland. They have no more reason to get out and vote for you than Trump. They will stay home or piddle away their votes for a third party if you are the Democratic candidate.

Your candidacies are a dream come true for Trump, Rupert Murdoch, Mitch McConnell, et. al. Their nightmare is a next generation candidate fixated on saving the earth rather than a place in the history books.

 

Phillip Davis

West Gardiner