"If It Was Your Child": Politics, Parochialism and Environmentalism in the Era of Trump

by David Balashinsky

There is a poetic justice in Trump supporters' getting their comeuppance.   Considering the magnitude of the damage that they have unleashed upon  the United States and its citizens, how satisfying it ought to be when the votes that they cast against their own self-interest come back - as they inevitably do - to haunt them.  Unfortunately, justice - even when it's of the poetic variety - is all too often visited not upon those who most deserve it but upon the innocent: their children.  Even when justice finds its target with perfect accuracy, the retribution she exacts is sometimes far more harsh than even the most justice-starved Trump opponent could wish on his most inveterate political adversary.  And when that happens, the satisfaction that is one's due is not so satisfying after all; not even bittersweet - just bitter.

Into this category I would place the tragedy that has been unfolding in Johnson County, Indiana.  As the New York Times reported recently, a spate of pediatric cancer diagnoses has hit Johnson County: 58 cases since 2008, according to a local support- and advocacy Facebook group that was created by parents of the victims, If It Was Your Child.  Although not definitively confirmed, the most likely cause is industrial pollution: a toxic plume of TCE (trichloroethylene).  As the Times reports,

The TCE contamination has been traced to a former factory [in Franklin, a city in Johnson County] that, for years, discharged industrial wastewater into a municipal sewer. . . .  In June, tests by an environmental group, Edison Wetlands Association, working with parents, detected the chemical in the air at two homes and in outdoor air near the site.  The findings prompted more tests by local and state government officials, including one by Franklin that found levels more than 250 times the state limits around a sewer near the homes.  In November, the E.P.A. identified a plume of contamination stretching beyond the site toward nearby homes.

The Times cannot fairly be accused of imparting political spin to its coverage of this story (as it has been by at least one of the members of the Facebook group) for presenting it as one of politics rather than as one more narrowly focused on health, safety and the environment.  After all, when children die or are at risk of dying as a result of previous under-regulation or lax enforcement of existing regulations, and when these children's parents vote "overwhelmingly" for even less regulation, this has the makings of a morality tale: a tragic amalgamation perhaps of King Midas and the Golden Touch (meaning, be careful what you wish for) and The Pied Piper of Hamelin (in the sense that one's failure to do the right thing will end up affecting one's own children).  Thus, it is not so much spin as a mere stating of the obvious when the headline announces "A Trump County Confronts the Administration Amid a Rash of Child Cancers" or when, four paragraphs in, the author of the article, Hiroko Tabuchi, draws attention to the paradox: "Now families in a county that voted overwhelmingly for President Trump are making demands of his administration that collide directly with one of his main agendas: the rolling back of health and environmental regulations."

It was this paradox that struck me when learning about the terrible misfortune that had befallen these children and their families.  If the Times has reported this story accurately, most of the residents of the county that has been most affected by this tragedy voted for Trump, which means that, by definition, most of these residents voted against environmental regulations and enforcement and in favor of corporate polluters and corporate profits at the expense of the public's health.  That is true even of one of the group's co-founders, Stacie Olson Davidson who, the Times reports, to this day does "not regret her vote" for Trump despite having this to say about him: "His loosening of E.P.A. regulations, it's infuriating. . . .  We're ruining the environment for money."  Here, then, is someone who supports a political party and a president whose sole policy objective (as opposed to their political objective, which is to remain in power at any cost) is to promote the interests of wealthy individuals and corporations - including corporate polluters - at the expense of the economic security and the health and safety of American citizens, including its children.  And now Mrs. Davidson is "infuriated" because she got exactly what she voted for.

How, I wondered, could someone be infuriated by the very deregulation that she had previously sought?  You will have to take my word for it that it was not trolling so much as a genuine desire to understand the mentality of Trump supporters that prompted me to join this Facebook group of aggrieved parents in order to ask this question.  One of the group's founders, Kari Rhinehart (who, as a matter of fact, according to the Times article, did not vote for Trump), replied (in part) with this comment:"no one in either party could've foreseen the magnitudes to which we have seen this president dismantle and paralyze the EPA especially when TSCA was passed unanimously by both parties just two years before."

Really?  No one could have foreseen it?  Throughout the campaign, candidate Trump frequently expressed open hostility toward environmental regulations.  And back in March of 2016 - well before the election - Trump promised "to get rid of [the EPA] in almost every form."

And it wasn't just Trump but the Republican Party itself that was champing at the bit to undo many of the environmental regulations that had been issued by previous administrations, particularly the Obama administration.  Consider these statements from the official 2016 Republican Platform:

[President Obama] has been regulating to death [an unfortunate turn of phrase, under the circumstances] a free market economy that he does not like and that he does not understand. . . .  This means relieving the burden and expense of punishing government regulations.

The environment is too important to be left to radical environmentalists.  They are using yesterday's tools to control a future they do not comprehend.  The environmental establishment has become a self-serving elite, stuck in the mindset of the 1970s, subordinating the public's consensus to the goals of the Democratic Party.  Their approach is based on shoddy science, scare tactics, and centralized command-and-control regulation.  Over the last eight years, the administration has triggered an avalanche of regulation that wreaks havoc across our economy and yields minimal environmental benefits. 

Of course, one of these "punishing" regulations was, as the Times reports, intended to limit human exposure to TCE, the very chemical implicated in (if not definitively established as the cause of) the micro-epidemic of childhood cancers in Johnson County:

Declaring TCE "carcinogenic to humans by all routes of exposure," the Obama administration had sought to restrict two of its riskiest uses, as a stain remover and as a degreaser, and had marked it for further review, potentially to ban the chemical altogether.  It had also moved to strengthen cleanup rules for hundreds of sites nationwide believed to be contaminated.

But at the urging of industry groups, the Trump administration has stalled some of these moves.  In 2017, it indefinitely postponed the proposed bans on risky uses, leaving as many as 178,000 workers potentially exposed.  It also scaled back a broad review of TCE and other chemicals so that it would exclude from its calculations possible exposure from groundwater and other forms of contamination - the problems present in Franklin. 

In contrast to what the residents of Johnson County, Indiana are experiencing, the 2016 Republican platform paints a rosy picture of the current state of the environment:

The central fact of any sensible environmental policy is that, year by year, the environment is improving.  Our air and waterways are much healthier than they were a few decades ago.  As a nation, we have drastically reduced pollution . . . and avoided ecological degradation.

Given the anti-regulation rhetoric with which the Republican platform's environment section is replete, the premise would seem to be that the environment has improved during the decades since the EPA was created not because of environmental regulations but in spite of them.  The platform as much as says so:  "Even if no additional controls are added, air pollution will continue to decline for the next several decades due to technological turnover of aging equipment."  In other words, if we do nothing, the profit motive and sheer entropy will result in the environment's getting better and better.  This flies in the face, of course, of what the environment actually was like before the EPA was created.

The 2016 Republican platform is notable for the extent to which it politicizes environmentalism in general and the EPA in particular.  That is not surprising since the Republican Party has proved adept at diverting public policy aims by attacking and discrediting them on political or ideological grounds.  Environmentalism - or, to put it simply, the movement to enact public policies intended to keep our air, soil and water clean and safe (and our children healthy) -  is represented as radical and, implicitly, unpatriotic - downright unAmerican.  This theme recurs throughout the Republican platform's subsection on the environment (which, itself, is treated almost as an afterthought - it is listed last - in the section entitled "America's Natural Resources: Agriculture, Energy and the Environment"):

These successes become a challenge for Democratic Party environmental extremists who must reach farther and demand more to sustain the illusion of an environmental crisis.  That is why they routinely ignore costs, exaggerate benefits, and advocate the breaching of constitutional boundaries by federal agencies to impose environmental regulation.

Note the use of the phrase "breaching of constitutional boundaries."  Nothing so effectively makes Americans feel so threatened by an imminent loss of liberty as to raise the specter of a breaching of constitutional boundaries.  Thus do the Republicans resort to the last refuge of scoundrels in order to scare well-meaning Americans into voting against their own interests and, in this case, against their own health and against the health of their children.

There is a much more basic issue here, however, than the specific environmental concerns of the residents of Johnson County.  It is a fundamental difference in ethics and worldview between, on the one hand, Trump and the current incarnation of the Republican Party, which is now suffering from a raging infection of Randianism and, on the other, those who hold a more liberal view of government.  This view, along the lines of Lincoln's eloquent formulation, is that the hallmark of our democracy is that it is and should remain a government of the people, by the people, and for the people and not, as Trump and the Republicans seem to believe,  government of the people by the corporations and for the corporations.  It is the philosophical difference between those who believe in laissez faire capitalism and those who believe in democratic socialism.  It is a difference that has been neatly distilled into this meme that has been making the rounds on Facebook for the past couple of years:

(Incidentally, I have searched extensively, but in vain, for the name of the author of this quotation and so I am forced to present it here, regretfully, without attribution.  Likewise for the creator of the meme itself.)

I thought of this quotation when reading about the plight of the residents of Johnson County and, especially, about the plight of their children.  For, as much as I was struck by the irony of Mrs. Davidson and these other Trump-supporting parents having once enthusiastically embraced environmental deregulation on ideological grounds, only to make a complete about-face when  personally affected by the consequences of industrial pollution, I was struck even more by their unabashed parochialism and self-centeredness.  After all, while these parents surely did not anticipate that their own children might be harmed by industrial pollution, that did not stop them from casting a vote in favor of subjecting other people's children to the risk of being harmed by industrial pollution.  Thus, it takes a special kind of audacity for a Trump supporter to join a Facebook group with the name "If It Was Your Child."  Plainly, this is a group of afflicted parents who would make claims upon the empathy of others not similarly afflicted.  The About section in the group's Facebook page confirms this:

"If It Was Your Child" is a non-profit grassroots organization founded in 2015 by parents of children with pediatric cancer in response to the alarming rate of childhood cancer in Johnson County, Indiana.  Our name was established when people had doubts about our cause.  We naturally began asking them, "If it was your child, what would you do?"

I do not know how many members of If It Was Your Child voted for Trump or currently support him but, statistically, and if the example of Mrs. Davidson is any guide, there have to be some.  But however many or few there are, still the Times reports that "many members" of the group "play down the politics, noting that both parties have let the cleanup fall by the wayside."  Fair enough, but there is a world of difference between failing to do enough to clean up environmental pollution and actively supporting policies that will inevitably lead to more of it (to say nothing of impugning the motives of those who support strict environmental regulations and robust enforcement in order to prevent catastrophes like that now faced by the residents of Johnson County).  To "play down the politics" in a case like this - as in all cases - is to falsely characterize politics as something abstract or merely theoretical.  It is to treat politics as though it were a game and not something with serioius, often life-and-death consequences for real people.  Those who view politics as merely a sport in which their team competes against the opposing team are people who have either never been harmed when government has abdicated its responsibility to protect the rights, health, safety and welfare of its citizens or who fail to recognize it when they have been or will be harmed.  In other words, they are people who say, "If it hasn't happened to me - or my child - I don't care."  But now and then, something happens to them or to their children and, suddenly, they care a great deal.  And then they are baffled when empathy from those not similarly afflicted isn't forthcoming.  And so they ask, "If it was your child, what would you do?"

Well, let's take a moment to consider some other children whose parents might pose this very question to those Trump-supporting members - whoever they may be - of If It Was Your Child:

Children who will be harmed, killed or their lives shortened by exposure to poisonous insecticides and numerous other toxic pollutants other than TCE, such as chlorpyrifos (to name but one), as a result of the Trump administration's reversal of rules intended to limit or eliminate these toxins.  If it were your child who is facing the development of neurological problems or some other ailment as a result of Trump's policies, what would you do?

Children who will end up consuming pesticide-laden food and foods manufactured with genetically-modified organisms because of Trump's support for big-ag and the bio-tech industry.   If you discovered, after the fact, that you had been unknowingly serving your children a diet of test-tube manufactured comestibles seasoned with toxic chemicals because of Trump, what would you do?

Children requiring health care but who are uninsured or under-insured.  As Trump continues to work with might and main to undermine and destroy the Affordable Care Act and to deprive as many Americans as he can of affordable health insurance, the number of uninsured children is on the rise.  If the only health-insurance coverage you could afford for your child were one of the short-term health-insurance plans being pushed by the Trump administration - a plan that inadequately covered her illness or didn't cover a needed service or hospitalization - what would you do?

Children who are at risk for obesity.  With the Trump administration "actively working to undermine effective children's health programs," expect our national epidemic of childhood obesity to continue.   If your child were marked for grooming as a consumer of excessively-processed food, junk food and fast-food by an industry whose coffers are growing fatter in proportion to Americans' bodies, what would you do?

Children whose opportunities for achievement in life will be curtailed by Trump's proposed cuts to programs that support early childhood care and education.  If it were your child, what would you do?

Minority children who will again be unfairly and disproportionately punished and stigmatized in schools  - with potentially life-long consequences - for infractions that are treated more leniently when committed by white students as a result of the Trump administration's reversal of Obama-era regulations that were put in place to insure equal treatment and punishment of school children.  If your black or Latino child received a suspension for behavior for which a white child received only detention, what would you do?

Disabled children who will be inappropriately pushed into remedial or special education programs because of the Trump administration's reversal of the same set of guidelines as those just cited.  If it were your disabled child who is facing a disparity in educational opportunities that would impede her academic and social development, what would you do?

Young women and men whose paths in life will be impeded by the Trump administration's reversal of rules intended to protect students from predatory for-profit colleges.  And young women and men who will face crushing and needless debt as a result of the Trump administration's proposed reversal of the loan-forgiveness rules that were put in place by the Obama administration in order to protect them from the debt that they were fraudulently led to incur.  If it were your child, what would you do?

Children whose parents - in part because of the Trump supreme court, in part, because of Trump's support for corporations and his contempt for the American worker - will now be forced into arbitration should they seek effective remedies, including financial compensation, for employment discrimination and other employment-related harms.  If you or your spouse had to tell your child that you couldn't buy that bicycle, move to that better neighborhood, afford to provide her with hockey or ballet lessons or send her to the college of her choice because you and your fellow workers had been systematically underpaid and, thanks to Trump, you were now barred from filing a class-action lawsuit against the company that had swindled you out of your wages, what would you do?

Children whose parents will be forced to work overtime without being compensated for it.  Trump's Labor Department is, as of this writing, shortly expected  to release its new overtime rules.  The Trump administration, after refusing to defend in court Obama's Labor Department overtime rules, which doubled the threshold at which employers were required to pay overtime, is expected to issue rules lowering that threshold, resulting in more Americans working overtime without getting paid for it.  For working Americans, that means working longer hours or taking home less pay.  If, thanks to President Obama, you had been able to work less hours and, as a result, were able to pick up your child after school but now, thanks to Trump, you could not, what would you do?

Children whose parents want to vote.  It is well established that Trump and his Republican henchmen have been doing everything they can to disenfranchise American citizens (some - not all).  If, on election day, you had to tell your seventh grader  - who happened to be working on a school project about democracy and the principle of "one man - one vote" - that you had just been prevented from casting yours, and as she, with tears streaming down her face, demanded that you explain to her how you reconcile the ideals of American democracy that she was studying in school with the realities that you were experiencing in practice, what would you do? 

Children whose very identities as transgender the Trump administration is seeking to negate through taxonomic fiat.  If it were your child who happened to have been born into the wrong body or who identified as a gender other than that typically associated with their specific chromosomes or genitals, your child whose federal protections against discrimination of one sort or another Trump is seeking to undermine or eliminate, what would you do?

Lesbian, gay, bi and other non-binary children whose rights - as children and as the adults that they one day will become - are under assault by the Trump administration.  If you wanted to adopt the child of your same-sex spouse, or if you and your same-sex spouse wanted to adopt a child whom you had been fostering, only to have the Trump administration give its imprimatur to agencies and state governments who want to break up your family or prevent it from forming strong legal ties and obligations in the first place, what would you do?

Girls whose mothers (and fathers) demand nothing more for their daughters' futures as women than that they get to compete on an even playing field and that they be accorded the same respect and dignity as men but who will, instead, be subjected to sexist and misogynistic attitudes modeled by the current chief executive of the United States of America.  Girls struggling with body-image issues and who now, even in their nonage, must be gasping for air in the poisonously misogynist atmosphere that Trump has done so much to pollute.  If your husband commented on how voluptuous your daughter is and remarked to others that if she were not his daughter, "perhaps I'd be dating her," what would you do?  If it were your pubescent or pre-pubescent daughter about whom Trump commented "I'm gonna be dating her in ten years," what would you do?

Children who have been cruelly separated by Trump from their parents - torn screaming from their arms, with who knows what sort of traumatic psychological damage as a result - who have fled violence, oppression, disease and malnutrition in their own countries in order to seek asylum for themselves - as is their right - and for their children - as is their duty - in our own.  If it were your child, what would you do? 

Children whose parents are journalists.  With 2018 going down as the deadliest in history for journalists, without any doubt directly attributable to Trump's irresponsible and unrelenting attacks on the press, including his calling the press "the true enemy of the people" - indeed, attributable to Trump's attacks on the very idea of a free press: the fourth estate, which is a cornerstone of any functioning democracy - and with Trump, even now,  giving aid and comfort to the despot who our own CIA has concluded was ultimately responsible for the brutal murder of Jamal Khashoggi - if your child's other parent were a journalist whose jailer, torturer or murderer was inspired and emboldened by Trump, what would you do?

Young women - girls, including even rape and incest victims - who will not have access to safe, legal abortions as a result of Trump's relentless stacking of the judiciary with anti-choice judges and who will be forced, as a result, to endure unsafe pregnancies or seek unsafe alternative means for ending them.  Girls who will be prosecuted and imprisoned for the crime of having suffered a miscarriage or stillbirth as a result of Republican-sponsored "fetal personhood" laws.  If it were your daughter, what would you do?

College students - barely out of childhood - who are the victims of campus sexual assault.  With the Trump administration working assiduously to undermine the rights of campus sexual assault victims, if your daughter went off to college and were raped but could not get the college to take appropriate action against the perpetrator because of the Trump administration's proposed higher standard of the burden of proof, as a result of which your daughter was forced either to withdraw or be confronted by her smirking assailant on campus day in and day out, what would you do?

Children who are being subjected to racist, homophobic, transphobic, Islamophobic and anti-Semitic intimidation,  hate speech and violence by those who have been encouraged with a wink and a nod by Donald J. Trump, himself.  If it were your child who were the victim of this growing, newly emboldened and resurgent bigotry, what would you do?

Young black, Native American and Latino Americans who are disproportionately killed by the police and at a younger age than whites.  If you knew that your black son was nine times more likely than other Americans to be killed by the police, what would you do?  Would you protest?  Perhaps by taking a knee?  If Trump implied that you ought to be deported for exercising your first-amendment right to protest against an unjustified police shooting of your child, what would you do?

Children who were slaughtered in the Sandy Hook massacre whose deaths have been callously, monstrously exploited - their memories outrageously insulted - by Alex Jones, a peddler of right-wing conspiracy theories on whom Trump has showered effusive praise.  If it were your child whose murder was exploited by a man whom Trump has validated by appearing on his show, what would you do?

Children who continue to be slaughtered in schools (and elsewhere) in mass shootings because of Trump's and the Republican Party's sycophancy before the NRA and their refusal to enact even the minimal, commonsense gun control that a majority of Americans want.  If it were your child who was shot and killed by someone wielding a legally purchased semi-automatic rifle with multiple-round ammunition clips, what would you do?

Of those who voted to keep Trump out of the White House in order to prevent him from doing all the harms listed above - and many, many more - it is not necessary to ask, "If it were your child, what would you do?"  After all, those who cast a vote for Clinton were not motivated exclusively or even at all by self-interest.  Not every one of them has a child who is at risk for poisoning from toxic plumes, a son who is statistically at a much greater risk of being shot by the police for no other reason than the color of his skin, a child who may be murdered in a mass shooting because of our lack of gun control or, for that matter, even has a child.  Such voters don't need to have a child in order to cast an ethical vote that is calculated to inflict the least amount of harm on the vulnerable - who, after all, at one time or another may be any one of us.  Such voters need only look upon the hardships and injustices that affect their fellow citizens and fellow human beings every day and reflect, "This should never happen to anyone, and that's why I care."