Time to ditch Donald and get with where it is, guys

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I LOVE THAT CHILD as if she were my own; I mean Greta, of course. I’ve also trashed and restarted this blog in an effort to keep pace with developing news. However, it all eventually comes out, I am seriously concerned with the fate of each and every individual pictured above—and the millions of whom they are merely a partially representative sample.

I’ve concentrated so much on women here because Donald Trump treats them as a ready-victim weaker and subordinate sex. He goes berserk when they fight back, turning the spotlight on his misogyny, racism, xenophobia, comparative ignorance and dismissive cruelty. He also champions the GOP’s attempts to criminalize abortion and deny other reproductive rights to women. I just can’t help these days visualizing aging white guys in Congress, some with vasectomies and Viagra ready at hand, voting on women’s rights to birth control.

So here we are. . . Greta, suddenly, at age 16, is a leader of the entire free world in the battle against climate change and has been nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize. Donald treats her like a fly in his soup. Blindly narcissistic, he continues to whine that he’s never won the peace prize, despite the qualifications of his friendly letter from North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, his withdrawal from the multi-lateral nuclear treaty and continued bullying of Iran, his withdrawal of the Paris climate accords and continued assertion that his lame brain is superior to the minds of the world’s career scientists, his treatment of Hispanic refugees at the border . . . Donald also still can’t get over that Barack (black) won that prize, while he doesn’t stand a prayer.

Donald’s friend, mentor and accommodator joined the assault on Greta the other day. Russian President Vladimir Putin said in Moscow, “I don’t share the common excitement about the speech by Greta Thunberg.” Well, of course you didn’t, Vlad. You were one of her targets. “No one ever explained to Greta that the modern world is complex and different,” he said. “People in Africa or in many Asian countries want to live in the same wealth level as in Sweden.”

But first and foremost, Vladimir, they want to live, and I believe that is Greta’s point. She describes climate change as a black-and-white issue, “with no gray area when it comes to survival.” Putin also accused her parents of exploiting Greta’s passion over the environment: “When someone is using children and teenagers in personal interests, it only deserves to be condemned.”

On the reality side, Greta wrote on Facebook back on Feb. 11 about how her activism dated largely from a winning story in a writing competition sponsored by a Swedish newsapaper, her search for an activist role and her enthusiasm for a school strike. This strike was inspired, she said, by the student response to the killing (17 dead, 17 injured) by a gunman at the Parkland, Florida, high school in February 2018. Students there refused to go to school after the shooting.

She got little support, so proceeded with planning such an event on her own. When she told her parents her plans, they “were not fond of it” (please note, Vladimir). “They said if I were to do this, I would have to do it completely by myself.”

So she did.

Her movement snowballed. The recent worldwide Climate Strike Sept. 20-27 drew 7,600,000 people into the streets and she has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.

So she’s not just “some kid fooling around.”

“There is no one ‘behind’ me except for myself,” Greta wrote back in February. “My parents were as far from climate activists as possible before I made them aware of the situation.” Her parents also are well known and respected in their own right. Her mother is an opera singer and her father is an actor. They have written a parenting book titled “Scenes from the Heart” that chronicles their daughter’s climate awakening. An English-language version, “Our House Is on Fire,” will be published next year.

If any of you think I”m going to let this topic go, think again and don’t hold your breath. I don’t have the have the physical ability to deal right now with all of the others pictured in this blog’s heading, but they are indicative of where my heart is, and I”ll be getting to them and others as time moves along. It’s still a long way to November 2020.

(I was wearing my “The Future Is Female” t-shirt as I wrote this.)