Sellus Wilder is running in Tuesday’s Democratic Senate primary. He’s really good—he led the fight to stop the Bluegrass Pipeline across Kentucky, and he actually has a plan for moving the state past coal, instead of pretending it’s going to come back. He’s accomplished in many ways: the film he made about the pipeline fight won awards and inspired many others in similar battles. He’s been endorsed by RL Miller's ClimateHawksVote, which is a great outfit.
But it doesn’t get much better than an endorsement from Wendell Berry and his wife Tanya. Wendell is for my money the greatest writer at work in the English language, and a man of remarkable character—too much to get regularly involved in the political scrum. So when he writes an endorsement, as he did yesterday in the Louisville paper, people listen. It’s also written in a tone that’s a good tonic for our acrid political moment:
We don’t make a regular thing of publicly supporting candidates for public office because as a regular thing we vote against candidates rather than for them, something we are tired of doing. And so we take considerable pleasure in letting people know of our wholehearted support for Sellus Wilder in his run for the U.S. Senate.
We approve of his platform, which we know that he is offering as a promise to his constituents to try in good faith to do what he has told them he will try to do. We are particularly grateful for his commitment to clean soil, clean water and clean air, though he understands the long-term difficulty of that commitment.
We are encouraged, moreover, to see that he is conducting his campaign by telling people the truth as he sees it, not what he thinks they want to hear. This means that he, unlike most candidates, is not afraid to lose. We believe that he is likely to win precisely because he is not afraid to lose.
Wendell and Tanya Berry
Port Royal, Ky. 40058