The Man Who Would Be Strong

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is wandering off, weak and alone.

Before our recent election,
our government had negotiated
with trading partners around the Pacific Ocean
to trading terms that did not abandon
the area to Chinese advantage.
Of course it was not something perfect.
Trade agreements have trade-offs.

Donald Trump said to forget it:
The Trans Pacific Partnership died.

Once upon the carnage after World War II,
Europeans and the US forged
the North Atlantic Treat Organization
to provide stability and security not only
for Western Europe but for us, too.

Donald Trump has not just questioned,
but undercut, the notion that NATO
and the Common Market is critical.
He and Vladimir Putin propose to cozy up
to each other and take care of all of that.
Leave Western Europe to Germany and France:
England can come along with us.

The Paris Climate Agreement was almost unanimously
agreed to, except for two small nations that thought
that it did not go far enough to protect the planet.
When the time came to meet again,
Donald Trump, alone, refused to sign on to the agreement.

The Man Who Would Be Strong
is standing strong, all alone,
while China is shaping global commerce,
while Putin is nibbling at Eastern European territory,
while the rest of the world agrees we have to limit emissions.
No one is following him.

It is not just sad that the US role in global affairs
is being shelved: it is disastrous for us.
Trade will be arranged, not to accommodate us,
but to work around us; to our disadvantage.
The ocean is rising, and a rising ocean
raises the water table in all seaside basements.
Hotter air, and a warmer ocean, cause the atmosphere
to do savage and unexpected things.

One of these days, I suspect
that we will hear it reported
that Donald Trump will--something like Xerxes--
be found at our borders, at the shoreline,
lashing the sea into submission.

He is strong, you know.

Comments

Nice to Run Into You Again

We do not see things in enormous time-frames. We human beings are fairly new at figuring things out for ourselves. For instance, some people today still think of the earth as a newly created thing, perhaps ten thousand years old. Earth is actually about four-and-a-half billion years old. That is to say, the earth is 450,000 times older than the Adam and Eve story, and the universe is three times older than that! I recall first hearing that continents were slowly drifting around the earth, and that there quite likely had been several times when the continents were squeezed together. But people could stand on the edge of their own continents, and not see Africa or Asia getting closer. It took at least fifty years to figure things out. We called our continent something special. But sure enough, there have been numerous times during several-billion year history of the earth, when supercontinents formed, and eventually drifted off. ...

The Sea is Rising

Let us just step back: two hundred and fifty years ago, or so, the ships of England and Spain had drifted onto a whole new continent, as they saw it, from far north to a savagely cold south; pole to pole, as if there were such things. Millions of people already lived here, some of them still hunters and gatherers; some of them very wealthy, indeed! Gold and silver stolen from the southern Americas funded Spanish and English dreams. There was land, lots of land, under starry skies above, rich land, and oil and coal and iron ore. The whole western world learned how to build industries not on simple muscle power, but on steam and oil. We farmed, too, of course. All we needed was cheap labor--slave labor from Africa, mostly, so the ships came with slave labor. Chinese labor built railroad beds where there had been rock cliffs. Europeans, long used to killing each other for good, religious reasons, brought their religious savagery with them. ...

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