Wake Up, Senators
On August 5th, the residents of Bertie County woke up to homes destroyed and lives lost as Hurricane Isaias struck the North Carolina coast head on. This destruction ushered in the fifth month of the worst global pandemic and economic crisis in our lifetimes. As schools in Bertie County and across North Carolina plan to reopen, coronavirus cases continue to rise, families still go hungry, and the climate crisis gets worse.
The world that our generation is inheriting is one defined by crises: the crisis of willful neglect, incompetence, and denial of relief in the face of the deadly coronavirus pandemic that has disproportionately killed and harmed communities of color, frontline workers, the elderly, the chronically sick, and those incarcerated; the crisis of economic austerity that punishes the poor and rewards the rich; the crisis of racist state police violence and state-sanctioned white supremacist vigilantism that has targeted Black people, stolen Black lives, and harmed other people of color through incarceration, spurious criminality, and outright killing; and the ever-expanding existential crisis of climate chaos that floods and incinerates our communities, bakes our farm fields and ecosystems, and increasingly threatens life on this planet as we know it.
This moment of crisis we are in did not occur by chance. It is easy to see exactly how we got here if we look at who is responsible: the politicians who are supposed to represent us and our interests. Two of the most culpable are our very own U.S. Senators from North Carolina, Thom Tillis and Richard Burr.
Senator Burr is the Chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, and he received near-daily briefings as the coronavirus pandemic arrived in the U.S. and spread throughout the winter. After one such briefing, Burr sold up to $1.7 million in stocks from industries like hotel chains that would soon be devastated by the economic shutdown required to mitigate the virus’s spread. Burr saw what was coming, but did he warn the people of North Carolina? No. As he cashed in, he mostly stayed silent and claimed we were well-prepared as President Trump assured the country that we would be fine and that cases would soon be “down to zero.” However, Burr didn’t stay silent to everyone — at a luncheon with the elite business club Tar Heel Circle, a group that had donated over $100,000 to Burr’s campaigns, he told them to prepare for a pandemic akin to that of 1918. He knew.
It’s no surprise that Burr profited off of our lives, though. After all, he did almost the exact same thing in advance of the 2008 financial crisis. And he was one of only three Senators to vote against a 2012 bill that would have banned insider trading from members of Congress, which he called “ludicrous” at the time. When it comes to protecting his constituents or filling his own pockets, Burr will choose filling his own pockets every time.
Burr has shown time and time again that he has no qualms with profiting off of or otherwise ignoring his constituents’ suffering. His career of climate denialism is only exacerbating these crises. In 2015, he voted for an amendment that claimed that climate change is a hoax. Devastating hurricanes and heat waves have struck North Carolina every year since, affecting every part of the state from coastal towns like Ocracoke to farming communities in Stokes County. We are wide awake to the crises we are in, and it’s past time that Senator Burr wakes up too.
Burr’s partner-in-corruption, Senator Thom Tillis, has displayed a similar disregard for the lives of North Carolinians both during and prior to his career in Congress as a state legislator. As a member of the State House, he presided over some of the worst gerrymandering in the country when districts were redrawn in 2010. The Supreme Court ruled that they were blatantly racist and unconstitutional. Like Burr, Tillis’ entire political career has been defined by enhancing his own power and that of the GOP, at the expense of our lives, especially people of color.
As over 150,000 Americans have died from the coronavirus pandemic and the death toll rises, Tillis has stood by his efforts to block Medicaid expansion in North Carolina. Rather than take any responsibility, he has used racist scapegoats and blamed the Latinx community for spreading the virus, when his inaction is truly to blame. A surprise to no one, Tillis remained silent as his fellow U.S. Senator Burr was exposed for profiting off of American lives.
Also unsurprisingly, Tillis has refused to act on climate change too. And why would he, when he’s funded by the Koch brothers, two billionaire architects of climate denialism? Both Tillis and Burr have frequently shown that they don’t care about the lives of us here in North Carolina — particularly the low-income and BIPOC communities that are disproportionately impacted by the crises they are benefitting from.
As thousands of North Carolinians die, face evictions and utility shutoffs, racist police violence, natural disasters, and lack of healthcare, we of Sunrise North Carolina are wide awake. Our generation was born into these crises. We know that they are unnecessary; we know how to take care of each other and keep each other safe; we know the path forward for caring for this planet. Senators Burr and Tillis do not; they are asleep at the wheel. It’s far past time for them to wake up too.
Follow Sunrise North Carolina on Twitter and Instagram: @sunrisemvmtnc.
