From San Francisco World Can't Wait | Original Article

"For a society so worried about things that can kill us, we've focused very little of our attention on the thing that surely will," observes Tom Engelhardt, author of The United States of Fear. "Warming of the planet - thanks to the fossil fuel system we live by and the greenhouse gases it deposits in the atmosphere - is already doing real damage to our world.

"When we speak of weapons of mass destruction (WMD), we usually think of weapons -- nuclear, biological, or chemical -- that are delivered in a measurable moment in time. Consider climate change, then, a WMD on a particularly long fuse, already lit and there for any of us to see."

But fear should never be the primary motivation of our actions, says Eddie S. Glaude Jr., chair of the Department of African American Studies at Princeton.  "The real danger is that the way we live our lives as Americans, no matter our optimism about the future, is no longer sustainable. We can't continue to live with the current level of income inequality. Hard working people are working longer hours for less pay. And politicians and their benefactors continue to argue for trade policies that have decimated the working class in this country. We can't continue to lock up black and brown people or watch them killed in cold blood by people sworn to protect us or fail to publicly educate all of our children. We can't continue to bomb people around the world into oblivion."

War and militarism fuel climate change. "The Pentagon is the single greatest institutional consumer of fossil fuels," notes Environmentalists Against War Gar Smith. . . Oil barrels and gun barrels both pose a threat to our survival. The amount of oil burned -- and the burden of smoke released - increases whenever the Pentagon goes to war."

We should not cower in fear, counsels Professor of Theology and Culture Mark Lewis Taylor. "Privileged citizens and residents need to bare their rage at the structures of abuse. . . we need to renew our commitments to the political movements on the ground and at work in contesting both the right and the 'lesser evil' of today's corporate and imperial state." But "any fresh vanguard for revolutionary change, must come from the most vulnerable themselves, from the communities long targeted by racist and misogynous power in the history of U.S. capitalism's structural violence. It is these communities' movements that put material pressure on the more privileged and protected to resist the corporate state.

"Those most vulnerable to a Trump regime are not powerless. They are not primarily -- surely not only -- victims. They are also resisters with powers for throwing off oppression, building movements for justice and to redress wrongs and imagine new political life. All the while they can also extend at times astonishing acts of love and human dignity."

"Donald Trump is a threat to the future of our planet, the safety of our communities, and the health of our families," charge organizers. "The new administration has attacked the hard-won protections of our climate, health, and communities, and the rights of people of color, workers, indigenous people, immigrants, women, LGBTQIA, young people, and more.

"Let's stand together for justice, jobs, peace and planet."