Candidates should make views known

Yes, the tragedies of COVID-19 are monumental, but looking at it this way, who would have thought that the horseshoe crab, with ancestral true blue blood background of 450 million years would have the very ingredient that will save us from COVID-19 virus and maybe other illnesses?

I see it like the spark happening of how George Floyd’s death pointed to the world how people of color suffer from systemic racism, and hopefully this little horseshoe crab will point us to see how we are all interrelated to all living creatures and that we need to quickly connect the dots of our relatedness to the earth and climate change and what we need to do to save our very lives.

In August, the Environmental Concerns Coalition in partnership with the Milford Library saw the need to have the eight candidates who are running for the Senate and the House in Hartford to have a platform to present themselves and tell their views, as future legislators, on environmental issues that would relate to us in Milford. We did much to make it bipartisan, but even after getting all the candidates to agree to the date for Sept. 13, much later, we heard one by one that the Republicans could not come.

We tried a second time, thinking maybe doing it virtually via Zoom would work. The invitation went out, but quickly their response was returned as no, not by them, but by John Draap, the chairman of the local Republican Party.

The Democrats: James Maroney, Frank Smith, Toni Sutton and Bryan Anderson, were willing, but it was finally apparent that these Republican candidates did not deem the environment important enough to even give a yea or nay. This goes for Mike Southworth and Erik Smith.

I knew Kathy Kennedy had some interest as she was on the Environment Committee, but in his words, Charles Ferraro does not believe that climate change has been caused by humans and was against teaching it in the schools.

It is very important that the voters know where their candidate stands on environmental issues.

Ann Berman

Milford