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AntiWar Mike Gravel Running for President in 2008|
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AntiWar Mike Gravel Running for President in 2008Delaware peace activist and former schoolteacher Michael Berg is running for a seat in Congress this year. Initially asked to run for the House of Representatives by the Delaware Democratic Party, Mike Berg turned the offer down and decided to run with the Green Party instead. The Greens were more honest and consistent in promoting the progressive values he believes in, Berg says.
Mike Berg stands strong against war, and has for a long time. Antiwar activism isn't just some convenient costume he has put on for the sake of a campaign.
Then again, speaking out against war is not all there is to the Berg for Congress campaign. Mike Berg also has strong environmentalist principles - the kind of principles that are becoming ever-more relevant as the impacts of global warming, pollution, and excessive exploitation of natural resources becomes apparent.
The following passage from Mike Berg's writings caught my attention because of the analogy Berg makes between our current relationship with the Earth's natural ecosystems and a rickety bridge made continually thinner by a couple of innocent, yet risk-loving, children. It's a warning to us that our civilization needs to grow beyond its juvenile drive to grow as much and as quickly as possible, regardless of the consequences.
"Cleanliness is no longer the major issue: Survival is. I remember once as a kid coming across an abandoned water well. The shaft was filled with debris. My playmate and I removed the debris and constructed a bridge across the open hole, then dared each other to cross it. Surprisingly, what two seven-year-olds constructed held. So we decided to remove some parts and see if it still held. It did. We repeated this process until I fell in. Fortunately, the only consequences were a soaking and, later, a scolding.What we are doing to our planet resembles my actions as a seven-year-old. Every day, we dismantle another piece of what common sense and science tell us is a policy that will keep the planet healthy. We are quickly approaching the removal of that final critical plank, but this disaster will have far-reaching and irreversible effects. I'm talking about global warming here.
The war in Iraq is a major distraction from this issue. Working to end the war takes a considerable amount of my time, as does working to win back the freedoms taken away from us by the current administration, as does working to reverse some of the most repressive social policies since the British ruled us as colonies -- but if we do not do something about global warming soon, and without political compromise, the rules of the universe will quickly make all other issues moot and our planet uninhabitable. Global warming is changing our planet. Glaciers are melting. The seasons are becoming skewed. Species are migrating and becoming extinct. Diseases that once were controllable are threatening us, as host species lacking immunity migrate away from areas where these diseases could not thrive and into areas where they do; bird flu is a good example. Temperatures are rising globally too. El Ni–o and similar weather trends made the past eight years the warmest in the history of weather tracking. Storms are more violent. Shifting rain patterns cause floods in some areas and drought in others. When have we before seen a hurricane season as long and hurricanes as numerous and as destructive as this past season, which brought us Katrina?
And what is our government doing to protect us? The answer is worse than nothing. They are dismantling the infrastructure that was supposed to protect us from disaster. They have sent our National Guards, supposedly our first line of defense, to fight an unjust war in Iraq. They have taken money from flood-control projects like the levees on the Mississippi River north of New Orleans and spent it on death and destruction in the Middle East. They are acting like my seven-year-old playmate and I did, many years ago."
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