I was recently surrounded by family at a cousin’s wedding which is always interesting, especially in the past several years as my environmental activism has picked up speed. Something happened that made me even more sure that the Trek to Re-Energize America and events like it need to happen a lot more often. My family comes from a wide array of political thought, from my raving liberal Aunt Patty to my Fox news die hard Grandpa. A few years ago when I admitted to my grandma that I was a vegetarian, she replied with, “Nonsense, John Paul. If you like it, eat it.”
So it was with trepidation that I replied when asked about my current employment in the lobby of a country club before the wedding. I currently work for the Sierra Club as an organizer with the Beyond Coal campaign, working to make the Pacific Northwest the first zone in the nation to go coal free. That explanation didn’t set well with my grandpa, a traditionalist who has worked in the banking and real estate world for much of his life.
Later that night after the vows had been said and the cake eaten he asked me a few more questions about my work and he made a comment that really stood out to me. He told me that instituting a cap and trade system in the U.S. would cost the average American family $3,000. The fact hit me like a brick, not because of the cost, but because I knew it to be false. The erroneous number started its life with the Republican Party and quickly made its way to Fox news and the rest of the media. The number came from a report by a few MIT professors and when they were contacted regarding the number they roundly rejected it as false and a gross distortion of the $30/family number their report had actually stated.
It was fascinating and horrifying to see how a simple lie made its way out into the public and down the vine to my Grandpa.
It made me realize how important the Trek really is. By visiting communities across the nation we will present ourselves as real, caring people, not as talking heads on cable news. Our future has become an unnecessarily partisan issue, due largely to our own politicians and the biased media that feeds off of them. We need to start presenting climate change, sustainable farming, clean energy, all of it with a more unifying message to wrest control back from the partisan media. I know it’s not easy, but the more we can have honest, one on one conversations about the base concept of a healthier future, the easier our work will be in the long run.
