Last Saturday at the Prince George’s County Green Power Awakening, politicians, business leaders, and local citizens came together to talk about their vision for a “greener” PG county – one that creates new jobs, protects waterways, diverts new growth in smart and green ways, and helps head off climate change by reducing carbon emissions. It was pretty amazing, actually, the discussions that all of these diverse stakeholders were having about how going green would benefit all of us. I’m not going to go too much into the details of the event itself, since the Gazette had a great write up of what happened.
Instead, I want to focus on the keynote speech given by Rev. Lennox Yearwood of the Hip Hop Caucus. There were the anecdotes about how far the Hip Hop Caucus has come in building community power over the last four years – going from protesting outside the White House to drinking tea and eating cheese on little sticks inside building with President Obama.
But what really stuck with me was this phrase, which reminded me once again why I do the work that I do: “If you don’t do politics, politics will do you.”
I’d never put it that way before, but the desire to not let politics “do me” is why I started going to anti-war marches as a college student. Why I get so excited about working for CCAN every day, as we’re continually doing politics here in MD and keeping our leaders accountable. Why I’m willing to risk arrest on March 2nd because it will mean sending a clear message to our elected leaders that it’s time to power past coal – that we cannot keep building and maintaining dirty coal plants that spew global warming pollution into our atmosphere.
In writing this, I realized that the sentence about doing politics also applies to global warming in a way. If we don’t step up and start drastically make changes in the way we get our energy and commute to work and build where we live, global warming is going to start to do us – all of us – in a major way.
