A Personal Plea to Save Our Democracy—and Vote

I live and work in blue states, but I grew up in a red one. Most of my family lives in Kentucky and most of them vote Republican. For all the cultural differences between blue and red states, I am convinced that the majority of Americans share basic common interests. We want to choose whether or not we have children. We want our children to not get slaughtered at school. We want and need our government to do everything it can to slow climate change, and to help us prepare for, and recover from, the extreme weather events we are already experiencing.

Too many of our career politicians aren’t fighting for our shared goals. They and the judges they appoint are defending other interests—the religious right, the powerful gun lobby, and the extractive coal, oil and gas industries—with increasingly tragic results.

My home state is a stark and painful example of this. The same week that Kansas voted to preserve abortion rights, eastern Kentucky was hit with a thousand-year flood. Because the Appalachian counties in the region had been strip-mined and logged by coal companies for decades, the heavy rain could not be absorbed by the landscape. Kentucky has long been represented by fossil-fuel pimps and climate-change deniers like Mitch McConnell, and now half the state is literally drowning.

Five of the 25 poorest counties in the United States are in Kentucky, according to Poynter. The clean energy sector could almost certainly employ more Kentuckians than the coal industry currently does—and help to slow climate change—but McConnell, who is personally worth an estimated $30 million and is one of the largest recipients of coal-industry contributions of any member of Congress, remains loyal to fossil fuels. McConnell and his colleagues would have us believe that big government is always bad. The deadly floods in Kentucky show why that argument is flawed. The argument is also applied selectively, by the way. We must leave big coal alone to ravage the environment, but the government can force a woman to have a baby? Sure, that makes sense.