Dear Progressive Reader,
August 6 and 9 marked the seventy-fourth anniversary of the bombings by U.S. forces of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Progressive throughout its history has been opposed to militarism and has often spoken out against the use of nuclear weapons. This past week, I paged through some of The Progressive magazine’s coverage and prepared a collection of our writing from that first tragic day of August 6, 1945 up through our June/July 2019 issue.
Last weekend, two mass shootings in El Paso, Texas and Dayton, Ohio, on August 3 and 4 took the lives of thirty-two people, and injured fifty-one others. These two incidents, together with others in the past few days, have brought the grim total of these tragic events to more than two hundred fifty or an average of more than one per calendar day for 2019. It is a trend that simply cannot continue. Leland Nally writes in an op-ed this week, “How can it be that in a world where there’s a mass shooting in the morning and a mass shooting in the evening, there’s never any time at all when it’s appropriate to talk about gun laws?” Meanwhile, Ed Rampell presents a proposal for compulsory firearm insurance insurance to address some of the financial costs of shootings, while reducing the desire to amass stockpiles of weapons. And Mike Ervin reacts to the scapegoating of people with mental illness by Donald Trump and others in response to these recent tragedies.
I am currently in Des Moines, Iowa listening to candidates, their critics, and their supporters. More than twenty-three of the 2020 presidential hopefuls are scheduled to speak, answer questions, and stroll through the crowds at the Iowa State Fair. (Beto O’Rourke cancelled his trip in order to return to his home community of El Paso in the wake of the shootings there.) One of the issues several candidates have raised is the threat of climate change, or as some are starting to describe it, “the climate crisis.” It comes not one moment too soon, as Mark Fiore illustrates in his cartoon this week. Many candidates also addressed the crisis in our health care system, although, as they did during last month’s debates, several still talked about the importance of people being able to keep their private health coverage. Bill Lueders strongly disagrees, and said so this week as he told his own health story.
Finally, we recently shared the words and poetry of award-winning poet Martín Espada, who spoke at a vigil in Salem, Massachusetts in mid-July. “This poem is about that hate crime [committed in Boston in August, 2015],” he said in the introduction. “It’s also about Donald Trump’s idea of hell: empathy.”
Keep reading, and we will keep bringing you important articles on these and other issues of our time.
Sincerely,
Norman Stockwell
Publisher
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