What set off John Quincy Adams to rail against slavery throughout his 16-year tenure at the U.S. House of Representative wasn’t necessarily the evils of slavery itself. The 6th President of the United States spent most of his life (and his presidency) quietly disapproving of this ‘peculiar institution’ but he was hardly a life-long abolitionist. Like many other white men of his times, he thought it would just go away. No, it was the “"gag rule," which had prevented the House of Representatives from debating petitions to abolish slavery”(Wikipedia) that really got Adams riled up because the rule was unconstitutional. Few cherished and held sacred our Constitution as Adams had. In pursuit of the gag rule’s appeal (which he won in 1844), Adams did become a fierce opponent of slavery doing much to embolden the abolitionists and hold our country’s feet to the fire over its original sin.

Our country, a couple of decades before exploding into the cataclysm of the Civil War, smoldered over slavery, uncomfortably tolerating this system of depravity because it was thought that keeping our country together was far more important than freeing millions of souls from hell on Earth. But the evil of slavery could not be contained any more than trying to keep the evil of not addressing Climate Change can be done in our time.

We don’t have a ‘gage rule’ on Climate Change, as such, though our federal institutions have been continually stripping ‘Climate Change’ from the EPA and other agencies. Like the CDC’s diffident report on the rapid spread of Lyme disease recently, which failed to mention Climate Change*, we are self-imposing gag rules by systematically avoiding the social pushback from those who find Climate Change objectionable. Our self-silencing on the consequences of Climate Change and not owning up to the ethical issues already inherent in a vastly unfair way of life harkens back to a time when a slave’s life just didn’t matter to the majority.

Our country’s present politics highlight another expression of the self-imposed Climate Change gag rule, where the public’s disinclination to vote for candidates who come out strong on addressing Climate Change still controls the national conversation.

Floods. Wildfires. Yet Few Candidates Are Running on Climate Change. In an election year that has included alarming portents of global warming — record wildfires in the West, 500-year floods in the East, a president walking away from a global climate accord — the one place that climate change rarely appears at all is in the campaigns of candidates for the House and Senate. The vast majority of Democrats and Republicans running for federal office do not mention the threat of global warming in digital or TV ads, in their campaign literature or on social media. Environmental activists and political scientists say it is a reflection of the issue’s perpetual low ranking among voters, even Democratic voters, and of the intense polarization along party lines that has developed around global warming, even as the science of human-caused warming has become overwhelming. (October 2, 2018) New York Times [more on Climate Change in our area]

It is unethical and suicidal for the public to allow political candidates to think addressing Climate Change doesn’t matter to them. The public must convince their candidates and leaders that the science and the ethics contained in this crisis are on the top of their priority list, or else we are going to vote ourselves into oblivion. Of all the consequences of Climate Change, humanity’s gag order regarding this great warming is the most pernicious.

Time passes.


* See my article: “Why doesn’t the new CDC report “Vital Signs: Trends in Reported Vectorborne Disease Cases” mention Climate Change?”(May7, 2018)