Trump’s latest action may leave the world choking on his self-justification.

Ever had a smoker sit down next to you?  In a theater, in a waiting room, on public transportation, you’ve chosen your seat and the person who plops down next to you reeks.  He’s not smoking at the moment, she’s not even holding a lit cigarette, but because of some previous activity, you’re pulling in two lungsful of reek, just as if the smoker was doing it right then.

Their hair, their clothing, sometimes even their skin carries the imprint of combusted toxins. They don’t have to be smoking at that moment, any smoking they’ve already done will affect anyone near them or downwind of them.   [Excuse me, I speak from experience:  my mother smoked cigarettes and my father smoked cigars.  That would be my now-dead mother, and my deceased father…]

Donald Trump is going to give us all that experience, over and over again – if we make it long enough to experience those multiple smog-assaults. The prevailing westerly winds don’t observe borders, they blow Santa Monica’s smog and Chernobyl’s radiation and Asia’s carbon dioxide across the globe because eventually, we all share the same air.

Pulling the United States out of the Paris Accords is more than wrong, it’s embarrassing and shameful: the U.S. pioneered this multi-national agreement, convinced almost all the rest of the world to join in, and has now left everyone else holding the bag we invented.

The problem?  Donald Trump has not only flipped off every nation with a government, he’s actually thumbed our national nose at every person on the planet, and our children, and THEIR children… if the planet can last another generation.

To continue the metaphor, he’s told everybody else THEY can’t smoke and has now said, “But I wanna so I’m gonna. The rules are for you, not me.”  We’ve seen this before; remember, President Pussygrabber openly boasted, “You can get away with anything when you’re famous.”

Unless we take action and prioritize our health and our children’s health over Snidely Small-hands’ ego, soon only the well-to-do elite will be able to afford the air filters and breathing apparatuses everyone will need in this so-called First World country.  The so-called Third World countries are pledging to continue the conservation and clean-up actions they’ve been taking.

Unfortunately for everyone, we’re all in this together.  That means the United States will be the reeking smoker plopping down in the shared air of our planet… or would a more apt metaphor be “a fart in church?”

By April Hannah