Help me out, friends. My 18-year-old son Casey was sucker-punched yesterday by Trump’s assault on two national monuments: Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante. He needs your advice on how to handle this first, devastating blow to his ideals.

Casey, a freshman in env. studies at Univ. of Montana, spent many days and weekends knocking on doors and chatting up people on the street – to build support for keeping these monuments and other public lands free from exploitation. He did this as a volunteer intern with Montana Public Interest Research Group. He called me frequently with updates – including about a tense standoff with Nazi-style white racists. We are winning, he told me. Until yesterday.

I am proud of this young man, and humbled by his fierce spirit. He was raised with an environmental ethos but is taking it so much further than I. Last year, high in the Sierras on a backpack trip to my favorite lakes, I showed him how to catch a brook trout and then dispatch it humanely with a rock smash to its head. Casey didn’t applaud…he wept, profusely. His tears made puffs in the granite dust.

“I’m sorry, dad, but the fish was so beautiful when it was alive. When you crushed his head like that and his body shook and the color faded from him, something happened inside of me…”

Tender Is Tough

I stumbled when he shared those sentiments, and went off by myself in the woods shaken, remembering the same scenario 45 years ago when I taught my young brother to fish. He held his first fish, a perch, in his hand and wept as the fish shivered. I showed him how to man-up by ripping the hook out and crushing its head. He had too-tender a heart, I said, and did him a favor by helping him coarsen it. It was decades before I realized that tender hearts must be strengthened not treated as a weakness.

I fully realized that on the mountaintop last year.

Life doesn’t give us too many re-do’s. Determined not to blow this chance, I told Casey I would never fish again for pleasure. A shocking vow, given that fishing has been my life’s truest, longest love. Fishing took me into the wild and…that’s a different story I plan to write some day. Today’s story is Casey’s.

In a nutshell, here is what I advised him when we spoke after yesterday’s defeat:

It’s War

“You have lost a battle, not the war. In the long run you will prevail because people like Trump are in it for the moment while you are in it forever – and for the right reasons. He doesn’t have your environmental soul. Environmental beauty to him is a green, closely cropped fairway; he never learned what you did about the nature of nature and our kinship with its creatures. You learned from me and mom to cherish and love and protect their home as if it were yours – because it is. By contrast, look what Trump taught his sons: to stand in triumph over the slaughter of noble and endangered creatures.”

I shared many other thoughts with Casey, and especially warned him not to conflate Trump with his supporters.

“Many are farmers who think rivers should be used for people not fish; loggers who see trees as their economic life support; coal miners who live in communities totally built around mining; four-wheelers who love to roar about wild and isolated places; and many other examples. Left unregulated, these activities would self-destruct our remaining wild resources and then we would all be without. Learn about these opposing views and seek to share with them your message about sustainability. You will win some hearts, some votes in the long run, and feel frustrated and depressed at how many ears will never hear you. But that’s okay – the momentum of sticking it out because you know it’s the right thing will carry you past the moments of defeat.”

Your Thoughts

Casey got it. In truth he always had it but just needed some support. And that’s where you come in.

What can you tell Casey – and so many other young men and women and youths like him – who are facing very tough political times and opposing philosophies? What words of power can you share as we hand them the baton?

Please comment and SHARE with your friends. I’ll make sure Casey and his buds get your message!