COOLIDGE, Arizona — “Dristan,” a 1960s TV commercial exulted, “is like sending your sinuses to Arizona.” Lots of people did that and insisted on coming along with them. Today, the Grand Canyon state is at serious risk of drying up and blowing away.

Carpetbagger crazies from elsewhere now infest politics in Arizona, which squanders water on runaway “development”: urban sprawl with lush gardens and lawns, retirement meccas, thirsty crops, orchards, golf courses, spa resorts, surf parks and monster malls blasted with frigid air.

In the short run, Florida is more frightening. A mob-style megalomaniac and a self-proclaimed God surrogate vie for the Republican presidential nomination, each bent on crippling democracy. Yet politics are reversible. Heedless humans in Arizona are playing for keeps.

The mercury soars, wildfires rage, land sinks into depleted aquifers, freak floods that punctuate endemic drought devastate homes built in the wrong places. Unlearned lessons in the American West are vital on a planet where climate chaos fast approaches a point of no return.

Here’s a suggestion: No one should be allowed to settle in Arizona before visiting the Great House in Coolidge, remnants of Hohokam Indians whose desert-dwelling civilization thrived for a thousand years before mysteriously vanishing just before Columbus “discovered” America.

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TUCSON – Alarm whistles on our pressure-cooked planet are ever-louder echoes from 1980, when America dumped Jimmy Carter after a single term. Smoldering embers Ronald Reagan left behind now fan into flame, and combustion threatens to blow Pandora’s box all to hell.

Carter, at 98, prepares to slip away while his worst nightmares from the past take real shape. This is no time to replace yet another effective president committed to finishing his job.

Carter’s much-remembered “Crisis of Confidence” speech in July 1979 (link below) foreshadowed the self-interested, money-fueled dysfunction that now divides America. He dissected a glum national funk and, point by point, mapped the way out of it.

But Kai Bird’s biography, “The Outlier,” captures the reaction: “He insisted on telling us what was wrong and what it would take to make things better. And for most Americans, it was easier to label the messenger a ‘failure’ than to grapple with the hard problems.”

As a reporter based in Argentina, then Europe, I watched the rise and fall of perhaps the most underappreciated U.S. president in history. The brutality he tried to stop soon spread into Central America, then to the Middle East and beyond.

Carter injected humanity into statecraft. He worked with the Kremlin to stem a nuclear arms race. He brought Israel and Egypt together and pushed hard to find peaceable co-existence with Palestine. He tried to wean America off fossil fuels and protect the global environment.

His brain trust included Samuel Huntington from Harvard, who famously warned after the Soviet Union imploded that the world’s greatest threat was a “clash of civilizations.”

Reagan is lauded for that theatrical flourish: “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down that wall.” But Carter’s diplomacy and Soviets’ 1979 Afghanistan invasion had already rusted away the Iron Curtain. Today, Republicans want that wall in Arizona.

Looking back, I see a lot of Carter in Joe Biden – decency, integrity and a smiling folksy exterior over hard steel. But there is a difference. With a lifetime in Washington and dealings abroad, Biden does not have to learn on the job.

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TUCSON – If Joe Biden has done as much for America as he claims, a snide Wall Street Journal editorial asked after his uplifting 73-minute State of the Union report, “why does most of America not seem to appreciate it?”

Well, one reason is the Journal itself. A carpetbagging ex-Australian Darth Vader weaseled his way to control of the once stately financial daily while weaponizing Fox News and the New York Post. But, of course, Rupert Murdoch is only part of it.

Too many voters today are easily conned, deeply biased, impervious to fact and bereft of survival instincts. Contrary to myth, frogs leap out of heating pots. Stampeding cattle stop at a cliff edge. Lemmings don’t really commit mass suicide. We’ll find out about Americans in 2024.

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NOGALES, Arizona – Tony Estrada spoke hard reality in a soft gentle voice:

“If you haven’t lived on the border, you don’t know what it’s all about. As long as you have a demand for drugs, a demand for labor, people will come across. As long as people need to make a future for their families, they will take whatever risks they have to. It will never stop.”

He would know. Estrada, 80, was a Nogales cop for decades and Santa Cruz County sheriff for seven terms until 2021. He has seen an open friendly frontier evolve into a Berlin Wall. I scribbled notes, nodding as he triggered my memories of mornings in an earlier Mexico.

People who demand a Concrete Curtain miss the point. That won’t stop anyone determined to go over it, under it or around it. Instead, it seals off Americans from a richly human culture with deep family values and a back-breaking work ethic just out their backdoor.

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TUCSON – This is an urgent note to friends everywhere – and eight billion others. In the unlikely event that some in that last group may not receive this message directly, please pass it around. Considering what we’ve seen in America so far in 2023, we need a New Year’s Revolution.

Homo sapiens have been at odds since we first began lobbing stones at each other. If we can together settle differences and repair the damage, human ingenuity can create an unimagined future for those to come. If not, we will be the generations who switch out the lights on Earth.

This is not hair-on-fire hyperbole, but rather the considered conclusion of a working reporter who has spent 60 years covering war and peace firsthand on seven continents. I hope I’m wrong, but I suspect I’m not.

After the Great War left 200 million people dead from conflict, hunger, influenza and genocide, T.S. Elliot wrote in “The Hollow Men”: “This is the way the world ends, Not with a bang but a whimper.” Unless we collectively lower the heat, literally and figuratively, it will be both.

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