You are being poisoned. So are your children and grandchildren if you have them. And the rest of your family and your friends. Slowly, of course, by the withdrawal and/or reversal of many of the most important environmental regulations adopted in the past few decades. It’s going to take a while for the effects to manifest throughout the population but you can be sure they will manifest in due time.

Why is this happening? Because the Trump administration is trading away protection of the air and water you need to prosper in return for … money. Money for himself, his family and the super-rich Republican oligarchy that supports whatever Trump wants. Trump is the handmaiden of the extractive industries, mainly petroleum and coal. Lacking a functional education and identifiable moral framework, Trump claims that non-fossil-fuel-based energy sources, like windmills, cause cancer and that electricity will cease to flow when the wind stops blowing.

Another element of the poisoning is the infestation of the country’s politics with ideas last prominently heard during the post-Civil War Reconstruction and the sorrowful Jim Crow period of American history and the period of the Southern Strategy in the 1950s and 1960s. Usually, the racism and related ideas behind these movements were masked in some kind of rhetoric to smooth over their true nature. Trump sees no need for that and his true-believer supporters routinely reward him for what is deemed to be his “lack of political correctness.” The underlying corruption and conflict with universal American values in Trump’s rhetoric and policies cause no discomfort for his ardent supporters.

The ultimate antidote for the poison that Trump has unleashed is, in the upcoming 2020 election, to vote out of office both Trump and his legion of jack-booted Republican know-nothing supporters in Congress and elsewhere. In the meantime, however, it is important to resist the poisoning of national politics and policy represented by Trump’s relentless determination to undermine the physical and moral health of the country while enriching himself, his family and the sycophantic Republican billionaires that benefit from his policies.

Everyone likely has one or two favorite resistance forces to which they contribute. I do not argue that anyone should stop supporting Planned Parenthood or any of the dozens (hundreds?) of worthy organizations that in their separate ways push back regularly against the evil that Trump represents. We contribute to some of them as well.

What I am urging is that everyone who sees Trump’s administration as I do should add a contribution to the American Civil Liberties Union and do it now. The reason is straightforward. The money goes to support legal actions against the Trump administration’s innumerable violations of law and the Constitution he swore an oath to uphold. The ACLU wins most of its cases and is an irreplaceable force against the unprecedented and destructive legal malfeasance of this administration. Even when it doesn’t “win,” the ACLU is often able to compel changes in policies that mitigate the impact of ill-conceived and unsupportable policies and practices that harm millions of people. The vast reach of ACLU’s legal resistance to the Trump administration is listed at https://www.aclu.org/about-aclu and https://www.aclu.org/action/

Money given to ACLU goes to actionable causes that have results. Trump likely hates the ACLU more than any other resistance organization because their successes in court have so effectively frustrated his plans to run over the legal system to get what he wants.

The ACLU just sent me a renewal notice for my December 2019 membership turnover. I am going to renew it now and double the contribution to help, in a small way, to fight the fights that must be fought right now. Then, in 2020, we’ll vote the bastards out of office.