Jimmy, Jimmy, Jimmy. A Progressive Gets His Due.

 


It's about time the record was set straight. Jimmy Carter was the most prescient, progressive president the United States of America never deserved. 

The Guardian reporter was trying to track him down when she reached his grandson, Jason Carter.


“My grandfather has met nearly everyone in the world he might want to,” Jason Carter says. “Right now, he’s meeting with the president of the United States. But the person he’d say he learned the most from was Rachel Clark, an illiterate sharecropper who lived on his family’s farm.

“He didn’t pity her,” Carter says. “He saw her power. My grandfather believes in the power of a single human and a small community. Protect people’s freedoms, he says, and they can do great things. It all comes back to an enormous respect for human beings.”

Born in 1924, Carter is now 96. Americans must process his mortality and the onset of climate change, which Carter explicitly warned the nation about 40 years ago.

Carterland, a just released documentary, offers a particularly sharp focus on Carter’s extensive work on conservation, climate and justice.

“Here’s what people get wrong about Carter,” Will Pattiz, one of the film’s directors tells me. “He was not in over his head or ineffective, weak or indecisive – he was a visionary leader, decades ahead of his time trying to pull the country toward renewable energy, climate solutions, social justice for women and minorities, equitable treatment for all nations of the world. He faced nearly impossible economic problems – and at the end of the day came so very close to changing the trajectory of this nation.”

He was not afraid to make unpopular moves, or ask for personal sacrifice. He was old-fashioned and a futurist, and nowhere did his futurism matter more, or seem more prescient, than on climate and conservation. He risked speaking directly to the American public, and asking them to do a difficult thing – focus on renewable energy and reduce reliance on oil.

He paid the price for this frank ask, and so did we.

 

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