The sighs of joyous relief from Democratic strongholds in the Land of Enchantment last week seemed like a gentle hurricane. As of this writing, the midterm elections saw New Mexico Democrats accomplish a rare clean sweep of all major state offices and send a unified contingent to the U.S. House.
Given the malicious confusion engendered by the GOP about our electoral process, the turnout was massive. Some 425,000 plus voters cast early ballots. And all told, 52% of registered voters, or 703,700, cast their ballots. Who knows where the other 48% percent went, perhaps into personal dungeons of apathy, cynicism and premature despair.
We know where the rabid right has gone. We’re watching the piranhas in the GOP political fishbowl smell blood and turn on Donald Trump, gnawing away at his ego and ravaged status as a winner.
Many of us were worried that the Republican Party, in which former president Trump had unleashed the furies of bigotry, fanaticism, science denial and systemic deceit would regain a semblance of power here this year. And we had got to thinking about what it would be like to have an avowed Trumpian in the Roundhouse, with all the former president’s preposterously odious associations — not the least of which is with the vile insidiousness of antisemitism.
Such a chilling possibility, combined with the GOP’s vicious attack on women’s right to choose, its avowed hostility to social security and Medicare, its blatant efforts to overturn legitimate election results, and its long hatred of environmentalism turned anticipation of the midterm elections into a political trauma unusually fierce even in our tumultuous lifetimes.
When letters with antisemitic allusions and powdered poisons were sent to Conservation Voters of New Mexico and the Environmental Defense Action Fund, along with the AFL-CIO in New Mexico, we knew it was indicative of the horrifying “normalcy” of antisemitism in hysteric right-wing America. This kind of terrorism against organizations that support climate science and revere a land ethic has a ring of typical Trumpism to it, mixing up as it does GOP enemies into a single glob of hate and defamation.
Even though Trump famously declared that he was “the least antisemitic person” in the world, it’s hard to forget the blatantly bigoted images used in his campaign against Hilary Clinton. In one TV ad, for instance, her face was shown against a background of $100 bills and a six-pointed Star of David in which was written “The Most Corrupt Candidate Ever!” Trump and his spinmeisters never hesitate to employ antisemitic stereotypes and tropes to insinuate corruption in their opponents. Antisemitism has been on the rise around the country since white supremacists, Christian nationalists, and “replacement theory” conspiracy paranoids were welcomed into the xenophobic Trumpian GOP. Anything Trumpists don’t like, they defame with antisemitic allusions. They deploy the same kind of cruel and sadistic hate speech that I remember a bully in my junior high school using against Jewish kids. I’ll never forget his leering superiority and loathsome mummery.
It is symbolic of another way of thinking that Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham signed into law an executive order in August that made New Mexico the sixth state in the union to adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA)
“working definition” of antisemitism and make it binding on all state agencies.
Lujan Grisham’s executive order reads, in part, “antisemitism, including harassment on the basis of actual or perceived Jewish origin, ancestry, ethnicity,
identity, affiliation, or faith remains a persistent, pervasive, and disturbing problem in contemporary American Society.” The IHRA “working definition” reads,
“Antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish
community institutions and religious facilities.”
Bigotry will be with us always, I’m sure, but last week it was kicked out the door in New Mexico for a while at least.
Now that Democrats literally own state government, it’s time for them to stop responding to Republican ploys, agendas, and sick preoccupations. It’s time, instead, to drive out the great defecating elephant in the room — the pollution left behind by the military industrial complex, by the Trump supporting and climate change-denying oil and gas industry, and by all corporate capitalists who make unconscionable excess profits from their unspoken policy of dumping their waste and relying on the taxpayer to clean up their messes, if they can.
In a time of unprecedented drought in the Southwest, the worst dry spell in 1,200 years, clean groundwater is the greatest asset any city or countryside can have. Clean groundwater is literally the difference between hanging on and surviving drought until patterns of moisture reappear, however briefly, or watching our life dry up, forcing us to move from our homes. To imagine that our groundwater is pure and we have all of it we need, is really like putting Monopoly money in your bank account and thinking you’re solvent.
Clean ground water is what Democratic constituents want. It’s time for the people we elect to pay attention.
We need to spend the funds it takes to find out exactly how dirty our groundwater is. We need a massive information campaign to gain support for seeking ways and funds to clean it up. And it we need it fast. No one knows how long this drought is going to last. And even if it actually lifts for a while, it seems a certainty that deepening aridity is the condition all Southwesterners will have to learn to live with, thanks to conservative climate change deniers and their anti-science propaganda.
We know already that most, if not all, military bases have groundwater pollution of some kind, especially Air Force bases. We know the three Air Force bases in New Mexico — Cannon in Curry County, Holloman in Otero County and Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque — do, too. And the airplane storage site at what used to be Walker Air Force base in Roswell has its groundwater issues as well. It’s believed that Kirtland, in fact, has the greatest spill of jet fuel in the country at some 24 million gallons. It’s right in the sweet spot of the city’s aquifer. We know that groundwater pollution is extremely dangerous for young children living nearby. Environmental conditions like groundwater pollution are increasingly blamed for the growing epidemic of non-communicable childhood diseases, including a wide range of birth defects, developmental disabilities and cancers.
We know that fracking for oil and gas not only uses vast amounts of water but pollutes it as well, and spreads the pollution around the countryside. We know that Los Alamos National Laboratory and Sandia National Labs have long histories of cavalier attitudes toward safely storing hazardous nuclear waste. Despite many well-documented accusations of being an endangerment to public health, neither lab has ever thoroughly cleaned up its legacy of radioactive waste. We know pollution is so bad at Los Alamos and surrounding canyons that plutonium traces have appeared in the drinking water in Santa Fe and had to be reported in city water bills. We know that underground gasoline storage tanks are often allowed to go uninspected and pollute groundwater all over the state. We know the generalities but we still haven’t spent the money to know the exact specifics needed to start the seemingly endless process of remediation.
We also know that conservative and often Trump-supporting corporate America and the military have invested immense amounts of money in a decades-long misinformation campaign designed to downplay the dangers of pollution and take the pressure off them to clean up their mess.
The time is now for environmental Democrats to put their re-election worries on the shelf and become, as Gov. Lujan Grisham says, “relentless” in the pursuit of clean groundwater in this time of potentially catastrophic drought.
*Nullius in verba: take nobody’s word for it
So proud of New Mexico for standing up to Trumpian Republican deceptions and lies, and voting for political leadership that has demonstrated a consciousness about what matters in this, one of the most culturally rich but poorest states in the Union. It is a relief that our wonderful governor will be able to continue and that even in the more conservative southern part of the state extremism was defeated. Hopefully, we may now enjoy a brief respite from months of constant pleas for monetary donations, and turn our attention to solving the urgent problems we face.
Climate Change needs all of our attention now. We absolutely can not cater to the NM Oil and Gas folks anymore, as it appears we are doing with the so-called Blue Hydrogen push they are fostering. And, we absolutely must curtail dark money in campaigns.
OK Dems, the ball’s in your court. Show us what you got! A cautionary note on the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA). There is legitimate concern that this may be interpreted by some as codifying criticism of Israel as antisemitic. One can be a critic of Israeli/Zionist policies without being antisemitic, though many defenders of those policies indeed make that claim. In the same way, critics of US policies are often called “anti-American.” I am a US citizen of Jewish heritage and strongly criticize many Israeli and US policies. I am neither antisemitic nor anti-American.