Email Evokes Thoughts of Whitman
By Michael Kaufman
Ah, Walt Whitman. How ironic that on the day I complete my reading of your Specimen Days and begin writing my humble thoughts for a course I’m taking at Empire State College, I should receive an email from Robert F. Kennedy Jr. In his message he bemoans the present state of our American democracy you so lovingly describe in your works. I hasten to add that it is not a personal message from him to me (as you might have received from one of the lofty personages of your era, but rather a message sent to many thousands of recipients via the internet) a form of modern communication you may have only imagined (and probably did) in your wildest dreams.
You see, I recently read a book he co-wrote (The Riverkeepers) for that same course and I learned that Kennedy has great love for nature, much as you did; he has worked tirelessly for several decades now to protect the environment. In The Riverkeepers he writes specifically about the Hudson River and its environs, places that you too knew well and loved.
A bit of background: In the years since your passing, our country’s waterways became so befouled that it became necessary to pass laws to protect them and make them clean again. You would have been proud of the way ordinary citizens all over the United States banded together to fight for their passage by national, state and local legislatures. The most important was the Clean Water Act passed by Congress and signed into law by President Richard Nixon in 1972. (Nixon was a despicable character but regarding this and some other matters of import he at least had sense enough to be on the right side of history.)
As you shall see from Kennedy’s remarks, the Republican Party has changed much since the days when you wrote paeans of praise for Abraham Lincoln, and even since the aforementioned more recent days of Nixon. In his message titled, “An Assault on Democracy,” Kennedy writes that the Republican-controlled House of Representatives “is swinging a sledgehammer at a cornerstone of contemporary American democracy and undermining the most extraordinary body of environmental law in the world.”
He explains that a bill currently working its way through the House would “hogtie” the national government’s role in administering the federal Clean Water Act and give states veto power over critical water-quality decisions made by the Environmental Protection Agency. This, he says, would pave the way for “shortsighted and self-interested state politicians to dismantle their clean water laws in order to recruit filthy polluters.”
“Corporate polluters—through massive campaign donations and relentless fear-mongering—can easily dominate the state political landscapes. Their indentured servants in Congress…. are working to disrupt the existing balance between state control and federal oversight in our environmental laws by returning us to the days of limited federal supervision—a time when local government was on the side of polluters in a partnership that was stealing people’s livelihoods, their recreation, their health, safety, property values and their childhoods.” This is not exactly the direction you saw the country going in before you shuffled off this mortal coil, Walt, but that is what it was like before the Clean Water Act was enacted.
“The original drafters of the Clean Water Act were keenly aware of the problems inherent in leaving all responsibility to the states,” writes Kennedy. “Prior to 1972, that scheme had ignited rivers and firestorms and left Lake Erie declared dead. We saw the results first-hand here on the Hudson River in the 1960s–where hundreds of fishermen lost their jobs because their beloved waterways had become too polluted to allow anyone to safely eat the fish. The Clean Water Act, enacted shortly thereafter, created a beautifully simple yet powerfully effective tool to help address these problems: a federal safety net for water quality that guarantees a minimum level of protection to all Americans, no matter where you live. And for nearly 40 years this approach has been working.”
Now, says Kennedy, the Republicans in Congress seek to roll back the clock by promoting “an agenda that benefits only those who seek to pollute our waterways—not the communities that depend on them.” Would you believe they even rejected an amendment to protect water bodies that serve as drinking water supplies, flooding buffers, recreation destinations and habitat for fish and game? “Sponsors of the bill would have none of it—further revealing their disinterest in the protection of the American public from the threats of water pollution,” writes Kennedy. “The American people didn’t stand for these congressional attacks to our environmental laws in the mid-1990s. And we must not stand for them today.”
I don’t think it presumptuous to say that my reading of Specimen Days strongly suggests you would agree. Indeed, as you wrote in the concluding passage, “American Democracy, in its myriad personalities, in factories, work-shops, stores, offices—through the dense streets and houses of cities, and all their manifold sophisticated life—must either be fibred, vitalized, by regular contact with out-door light and air and growths, farm scenes, animals, fields, trees, birds, sun-warmth and free skies, or it will certainly dwindle and pale.”
Michael can be reached at michael@zestoforange.com.
Tags: Clean Water Act, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Walt Whitman
