Ernst trying to divide America?

I am writing to the people of Newton to disagree with Senator Ernst’s essay “Radical Policies from coastal elites hurt rural America.”

My name is Lee McKusick and I am from the coastal California community El Granada. The first thing to realize about Senator Ernst’s essay is her essay title contains exaggerations that you should recognize.

The first exaggeration is, California is not a hotbed of “Radical policies.” The state has spent 67 years trying to deal with air pollution. There are no radical air pollution policies out here. How about reviewing the Amana Colonies and coming up with some fresh and plainspoken Iowa ideas?

The second misleading phrase is “coastal elites hurt rural America.” These words are a “just folks like us” rhetorical appeal. She is dividing America against itself. She is emotionally splitting people who live in Kansas with the emotional word hurt. And regarding the word “coastal elites,” if you write me back and tell me I am one, I will answer back with an equal amount of praise toward you.

Finally, she associates California Governor Gavin Newsom with the action that concerns her. The California Governor “fully embraced the Green New Deal...”

It appears to me that Senator Ernst regards the Green New Deal as a “... a devastating blow to our biofuel producers and farmers who have already had a tough go during COVID-19.”

During the Donald Trump presidency, he had a tendency to wildly exaggerate the actions of government. Think about what you saw on January 6th, people literally climbing the walls of the Congress.

He is gone and it is time to go back to quiet happy dull as dishwater government.

The biggest error Senator Ernst makes is to regard the Green New Deal as a stopping point for thinking about global warming. The Green New Deal is a series of programs modeled on the Roosevelt New Deal that needs to be updated by Kansas and Midwestern Land Grant university agriculture departments and scientific thinkers.

The previous president pointedly ignored the articulate teenager Greta Thunberg. She said, which I badly paraphrase, we need to immediately move to a much lower fossil fuel CO2 emission world life.

We have lost several precious years to the task of avoiding positive feedback climate degradation. Abraham Lincoln said these words at a time of great crisis and they apply to us now ... “The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, we must think anew and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.”

Lee McKusick

El Granada, Calif.