President John F. Kennedy was assassinated 56 years ago last week, on the day before Thanksgiving in 1963 at the age of 46. It was a moment when the world turned upside down for many of us. That Thanksgiving was the bleakest I can remember. It was the first time that Americans of my generation had experienced almost first-hand a highly public political murder. And the victim, many thought, was not only a bright symbol of America’s post-war future but a thinking person’s president, one who understood the perils of foreign relations, racial prejudice and environmental carelessness.
I remember, too, how shocked I was when I heard people who seemed mired in hatred say they thought Kennedy had it coming. They seemed to me like heartless Ebenezer Scrooges cackling and scheming, rattling their chains, counting mountains of gold doubloons, reveling in their riches. They were the same people I would come to consider capitalistic saboteurs of environmental sanity in the age of global warming nearly sixty years later, like those companies and politicians who are working today to undermine the Clean Water Act of 1972 in the Supreme Court case involving the poisoning of coral reefs in Hawaii.
It’s not that Kennedy was a Lancelot, pure of body, mind and soul. He was an American politician, a child of capitalist culture himself, a member of the upper crust, though shunned by those who hated Catholics and the Irish. He was adroit at the rough and tumble of democratic elections, a political winner burdened with all the compromises and backroom realities that can mean. Though rich and regal in bearing, Kennedy was also an idealist who believed in public service, a man cleansed of cynicism by war, who considered pursuing the public good a moral duty and the profound and worthy responsibility of those born into privilege. He embodied a pragmatic, and I still think heartfelt, noblesse oblige.
His thinking about citizenship and public life was the exact opposite of those who espouse the modern brand of fatuous, hysteric, social and economic Me-ism that runs our country today. These greedy, hate-filled pols and their bully “base” extol and defend exploitation and see cheating and self-aggrandizing as a sacred right and privilege of the ruling class.
Kennedy’s political bearing was a direct assault on the grand banditry of the Me-ism of his day. That’s why his fewer than three years in office were marked by early-stage policy formation around civil rights, job creation through public works and environmental justice.
In the words of America’s great essayist E.B. White writing in the New Yorker in 1963, ten days after Kennedy’s killing, “he was young enough and tough enough to confront and enjoy the cold and wind of these times, whether the winds of nature or the winds of political circumstance and national danger…. It can be said of him, as of few men in a like position, that he did not fear the weather and did not trim his sails, but instead challenged the wind itself to improve its direction and to cause it to blow more softly and more kindly over the world and its people.”
This holiday season, it’s Kennedy’s environmental conscience and common sense that bolsters my optimism, especially as the Clean Water Act of 1972 comes under fire from conservative Scrooges and their corporate shills. A case in point is what’s happening in the County of Maui, Hawaii, over the discharge of poorly treated water into the Pacific Ocean, where it’s killing off important coral reefs around the island of Maui.
Even in the in the early days of American environmentalism, Kennedy supported Rachel Carson’s view of pesticide pollution in her book “Silent Spring.” In 1962, he created a Science Advisory Committee to investigate Carson’s thesis about the dangers of DDT, which ended in supporting her views to the letter and helping to have the pesticide banned. He was outspoken about water conservation in Arizona and the West and chose one of the great conservationists of his day, Stewart Udall, to be his Secretary of Interior. Udall influenced President Lyndon Johnson to support and sign the Wilderness Act, the Water Quality Act, the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act and the National Trails Systems Act.
The Clean Water Act, of which Kennedy was the spiritual father, is under fire in Hawaii in the U.S. Supreme Court. It’s an odd case but one with potentially far-reaching consequences. Basically, the County and island of Maui pumps treated wastewater into deep groundwater reserves. The treated water, however, does not stay in the groundwater but migrates into the Pacific Ocean, where it becomes a pollutant and has various ill effects on aquatic life. The Clean Water Act of 1972 protects navigable waters, such as larges rivers and oceans. Earthjustice, the Hawaii Wildlife Fund and others have sued the County of Maui under the Clean Water Act. The county contends it’s not at fault when the treated wastewater ends up in the Pacific, as it injects it first into the groundwater. What happens next, it says, is out of its control. When the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals disagreed with the county, the county took the case to the Supreme Court, where it remains, despite numerous settlement attempts.
If the Supreme Court sides with Maui County, other navigable waters might be threatened by polluted wastewater and other contamination. The subsequent polluters would argue that the Maui decision sets a precedent, allowing movement of pollution into protected waters if such movement was beyond their control and therefore beyond their intention. The logic is supremely faulty, consistent with the Trump administration’s hostile attitude toward all environmental regulation to protect public health. Once a pollutant has entered navigable waters and has been scientifically recognized, to continue polluting would be a premeditated violation of the Clean Water Act and an assault on the public’s health.
And that’s the clear difference between the boorish and dangerous Me-ism of Trumpish America and John F. Kennedy’s pursuit of the public good.
*Nullius in verba: take nobody’s word for it
Dear Mr. Price:
I thoroughly enjoyed this article. I would love your permission to post it on my WaterWired blog (www.waterwired.org).
Thanks very much.
Michael