It was a shock to read a recent interview with Dennis Prager, “‘Truth is the left’s mortal enemy’ — a conversation with Dennis Prager,” which had a section mocking a young woman for being distressed by climate change, racism and inequality as “devoid of any actual reasons to be depressed.”
I am 53, and climate change terrifies me. Already it has profoundly disrupted agriculture and fisheries in many tropical regions, weakening already fragile states like Guatemala and the Philippines and Burkina Faso and pushing streams of desperate people north, to the U.S. or the EU. Most of the Middle East is projected to be unlivable within decades. But I don’t need to think that far from home. I dread the onset of summer here, when the earth is baked for weeks on end. Even winter is neutered, as storm after storm crosses Utah and the snow in Eagle Mountain never falls deeper than an inch or two.
To compound things, relationships wither under the technology onslaught (a second reason fewer kids are outside), so people lack many of the emotional resources our forebears had to deal with hard times.
Considering his words, and these situations — I haven’t even touched on racism or inequality — I must wonder, What are conservatives seeking to conserve? If not Mother Nature, the very root of human existence, and not social relationships, then what? Are liberals like me the “new conservatives?”
Brian Harmon
Eagle Mountain