Dorothea Lange, Road to California (1936)

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Coping with Katsaridaphobia

Albert Bates

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“Desert religions are all about scarcity, sea people invading, and Pharoah casting out the righteous, who go about looking for a savior.”

There are more important issues to be discussing than President Cobblepot’s latest tweet, but I feel the need to examine his wall fetish in a little more depth because lately, we are seeing Democrats, including all the 2020 candidates, buying into at least part of the Republican scare narrative. That bothers me. As a voter, even if my elections are rigged, I like to at least think there might be a difference between my choices. In the last couple of presidential elections, I voted for Jill Stein to become the first female-identified POTUS. But if she or whatever Green candidate were now to talk about our “immigration crisis,” I would blow a fuse.

According to the World Bank, by 2050 some 140 million people may be displaced by sea-level rise and extreme weather, driving escalations in crime, political unrest, and resource conflict. Even if the most conservative predictions about our climate future prove overstated, a 1.5-degree Celsius rise in temperature during the next century will almost certainly provoke chaos, in what experts call climate change’s “threat multiplier”: Displacement begets desperation begets disorder.

The New York Times, April 10, 2019

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