As soon as fossil-fuel financed Donald Trump was sworn into office, he got busy destroying the nation’s climate progress. In June 2017, Trump announced that the U.S. would withdraw from the Paris Treaty, shamefully walking away from a global commitment to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, the only signatory country in the world to do so.

“We’re supposed to kiss for six seconds,” Ray told me after reading an article.

My mom died from COVID four years ago, just after Mother’s Day. I couldn’t write about it until I could be honest about who she was, a feat complicated by my then-pending Congressional race, which I lost in spectacular fashion. Apparently climate change isn’t at the top of voters’ concerns. Yet.

If I was in college today, with the same longing for peace and equality I had then and have now, I’d be in a tent protesting the slaughter of 34,000 women and children by a country with limitless weapons of war. In fact, I did.