A Time for Turning - WA Ballot Initiative 1631

A Time for Turning, WA Ballot Initiative 1631

By Rev. Carol Jensen and Ron Young

            In the popular contemporary Christian hymn, Canticle of the Turning, the refrain ends with the hopeful words, “the world is about to turn.”  The famous Jewish philosopher, Martin Buber, tells us, “the power of turning never reveals itself outside of crisis.” A near total (97%) consensus among scientists tells us that we face a profound crisis today over dangers from global warning, primarily caused by human activity and specifically by over use of fossil fuels. A Gallup Poll in 2017 tells us that 84% of Americans worry “a lot” or “some” about global warming, while only 16% worry “not at all.” A poll this Spring reveals that most registered voters believe the United States should reduce polluting greenhouse gas emissions, while only 4% of voters believe the U.S. should not reduce its emissions.

Washington state is playing a unique, leading role in the nationwide response to the problem of pollution and scientifically verifiable dangers of global warming. The Trump administration seems to ignore or deny the problems, pulling out of the Paris Agreement on Climate Change, and prompting the EPA to gut long-standing health and environmental protections, and cancel new positive regulations to reduce CO2 emissions. This is the context in which signing, circulating and urging others to sign WA Ballot Initiative 1631 is important, urgent, and the right thing to do.

 Initiative 1631 is already endorsed by more than 100 Washington state organizations, including faith communities, businesses, labor unions, environmental and clean energy advocates, health professionals, Washington tribal nations, and communities of color advocates. This may well be the broadest support of any initiative in Washington state history. We all do our part to keep Washington clean, but right now the largest polluters can pollute for free while we all pay the costs. I-1631 would put a fee ($15 per ton) on the state’s largest polluters, including the oil industry and utilities that have not switched to clean energy, and would invest in protecting our air and water, clean energy infrastructure, and in new jobs across the state.

In addition to incredibly broad-based support for the initiative, another unique feature of this proposal of a fee (different than a tax) is the requirement that the revenue collected from I-1631 cannot simply be used by the state government as general funds but will be allocated by a broad-based, publicly accountable board, made up of experts and trusted community leaders. As examples, I-1631 will invest in developing job generating clean energy alternatives, including wind, solar and other renewable resources, transportation alternatives, better home and building energy efficiency, and it will provide support to communities hardest hit by pollution because the neighborhood you live in shouldn’t determine if your air is clean and your water is safe to drink.

It’s almost impossible any more, no matter who you voted for in 2016, to ignore the threats of pollution and global warming. Even with Trump appointees heading all the national intelligence agencies, the Worldwide Threat Assessment of the U.S. Intelligence Community recently warned,

“The impact of the long-term trends toward a warmer climate, more air pollution, bio-diversity loss, and water scarcity are likely to fuel economic and social discontent, and possibly upheaval…The last few years have been the warmest on record. Extreme weather events in a warmer world have the potential for greater impacts and can compound with other drivers to raise the risk of humanitarian disasters, conflict, water and food shortages, population migration, labor shortfalls, price shocks, and power outages.”

            Our state has a legacy of protecting the home we all share. We know if we don’t act now, the threats from pollution and global warming will only get worse and cause more harm to our communities and risks for our children’s future. I-1631 is a practical first step in our state to ensure clean air and clean water and represents a significant contribution in the larger campaign to reduce the threat of global warming.

Faith communities are supporting Initiative 1631 based on deep concern about the disproportionate impact of pollution and climate change on communities of color and on already impoverished people, as well as a fundamental commitment to care for creation, a responsibility entrusted to us by our Creator. It will take faithful, intelligent, persistent citizen efforts and action over many years on many levels – local, state, national, and international – to creatively meet the challenges of global warming. In the next weeks and months, the most important contribution we can make here in Washington State is to get Initiative 1631 on the Ballot and approved by Washington voters in November.

Rev. Carol Jensen is Co-Chair of the statewide Faith Action Network.

Ron Young is an activist and author. Ron’s memoir, Crossing Boundaries

in the Americas, Vietnam and the Middle East was published in 2014.

Carol and Ron are married and live in Everett.

Ron can be contacted at ronyoungwa@gmail.com

(This Commentary appeared in The Everett Herald on Sunday, June 10, 2018.)

Veterans Group Says "NO" to Emmy for PBS Vietnam War Documentary

You all know that I offered critical commentaries on each of the ten episodes of the PBS Vietnam War Documentary. Given all the Documentary's distortions and shortcomings, I agree with Veterans for Peace that it does not deserve and should not be awarded an Emmy. I hope, if you agree, you will share this with others.

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Thursday, May 31, 2018

Veterans’ Group Says “No” to Emmy for PBS Vietnam War Series

“In this war-torn world, what is desperately needed – but what Burns and Novick fail to convey – is an honest rendering of that war to help the American people avoid yet more catastrophic wars.”

By Mike Ferner

A national veterans’ organization is weighing in on this year’s Emmy awards with a full-page ad in Variety, saying Ken Burns and Lynne Novick’s “Vietnam War” series does not deserve a “Best Documentary” award.

Veterans For Peace (VFP), headquartered in St. Louis, with 175 chapters in the U.S. and six overseas, will run the Variety ad prior to the awards on September 17, to generate discussion about the series and the lasting impact it will have if “crowned with an Emmy.”

The ad says that because “The Emmy Award is a powerful recognition of truth in art,” Emmy judges are asked to consider whether, “In this war-torn world, what is desperately needed – but what Burns and Novick fail to convey – is an honest rendering of that war to help the American people avoid yet more catastrophic wars.”

The ad (attached) identifies what it considers the fundamental flaw of the PBS series: Burns and Novick “assert at the beginning that the war ‘was begun in good faith by decent people, out of fateful misunderstandings.’”  Questioned about this in a New York Times interview, Burns admitted that might have been “too generous to our leaders,” but he stuck by it.

VFP’s ad quickly responds to that “generous” remark, saying, “Even a cursory reading of the Pentagon Papers disclosed by Daniel Ellsberg,” (inexplicably missing from this history) “demonstrates the falseness of this claim of American innocence.”  The painful truth, according to the ad, is that the United States “rained incredible violence on the Vietnamese people merely to replace France as the dominant power in Southeast Asia.”

Another shortcoming in last fall’s series was it paid far too little attention to the millions of civilian deaths the U.S. caused in Southeast Asia, skips over the millions of people still suffering from the effects of Agent Orange and ignores some 700,000 tons of unexploded ordnance still lurking in the fields of Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, still killing and injuring today.

Acknowledging that Burns and Novick were “justifiably critical of American presidents and military leaders” the veterans say the filmmakers, “mainly focus on the harm to U.S. soldiers” and “reinvigorate Cold War myths that the Vietnamese anti-colonial struggle was merely an extension of Soviet and Chinese communist expansion.”

Another shortcoming in last fall’s series was it paid far too little attention to the millions of civilian deaths the U.S. caused in Southeast Asia, skips over the millions of people still suffering from the effects of Agent Orange and ignores some 700,000 tons of unexploded ordnance still lurking in the fields of Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, still killing and injuring today.

Many VFP members have first-hand knowledge of the broad anti-war movement, some as participants in the active-duty G.I. resistance where they conducted peaceful protests, sabotage and outright mutiny, and some in the civilian peace movement after their military service.  Nowhere in 18 hours of programming does the G.I. resistance movement merit mention and “instead of honoring the civilian peace movement for its accomplishments, activists are generally belittled as self-interested and self-indulgent, with stress on its supposed deep antagonism toward American soldiers,” the ad protests. 

VFP concludes its ad, just above an iconic photograph of protesting G.I.s holding a banner emblazoned with, “We won’t fight another rich man’s war,” by saying that if the Burns/Novick series is “crowned with an Emmy, this defective history of the Vietnam era will become required viewing for generations of young Americans—a seductive, but false, interpretation of events.”

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