Hayden Flanery and Kristen Cherry

Opinion contributors

What does it take to catch your senator’s eye?

Over the past couple of weeks, we, the Kentucky youth of the Sunrise Movement, have been trying to get a meeting with Sen. Mitch McConnell. On Feb.12, he announced that he would hold a vote on the Green New Deal without holding any hearings, listening to any expert testimony, or holding any meetings with his constituents on what it means for us.

Since that announcement, we have been searching for McConnell to ask him to look us in the eyes and tell us why he is insisting on playing games with our futures. We visited his office repeatedly that week of recess, camping outside his office on Thursday in the freezing rain in an attempt to meet with him. When that failed, we followed him to Washington, D.C., to try to speak to him there.

We were joined on Capitol Hill by hundreds of other young people in the Sunrise Movement. We shared our stories and experiences as young people in Kentucky facing the catastrophic effects of extreme flooding, strip mining and mountaintop removal, and a persistent lack of economic opportunities in our state.

'It’s our futures':Louisville students call for action on Green New Deal

Despite all of this, despite our repeated attempts to meet with him directly, McConnell is still leaving us out in the cold. Instead of meeting face-to-face with young Kentuckians, he has decided to respond only to an opinion piece in this newspaper in an effort to portray our movement as one solely championed by distant New York executives, without mentioning us by name. Yankees make a good scapegoat in our state; how convenient it would be for Mitch if that were true.

Well, we’re here to tell him again: We are Kentuckians. We were born in Kentucky, raised in Kentucky. While McConnell has hidden in Washington, we have grown up in Kentucky. We are your constituents and future constituents. We live in Kentucky neighborhoods, go to Kentucky schools and drink Kentucky water. And we support a Green New Deal.

McConnell:Democrats' radical Green New Deal would uproot our lives

We are not alone in this: Recent polling shows that more than 80 percent of the general public agrees with the principles of the Green New Deal. Nor are we on the fringes of a radical movement: Our members come from all over the state, including Louisville, Lexington, Morehead, Paducah and London, Kentucky (and more every day). We are Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives, Kentuckians from all walks of life. As part of the Sunrise Movement, we are committed to this core principle: We are not looking to the right or left. We look forward.

The one thing that unites us is the conviction that our home state of Kentucky deserves better. Kentuckians deserve access to jobs with living wages. Kentuckians deserve clean water and clean air, healthcare and affordable housing. This is what the Green New Deal offers, and this is what Kentucky needs. It is the only proposal that realistically addresses both the climate crisis and economic insecurity, which both drastically impact the lives of Kentuckians.

In addition, Kentucky deserves a senator who will actually meet with his young constituents and look us in the eyes instead of ignoring us.

By refusing to meet with us, McConnell is ignoring the stories of Kentuckians who support the Green New Deal, claiming in an effort to defend his actions that these demands come from outside our state.

He is ignoring Jenny Bencomo-Suarez, 21, of Louisville, who is from a working-class black and brown neighborhood that suffers from high pollution rates and frequent flooding. He is ignoring Lily Gardner, 15, who grew up in Eastern Kentucky and witnessed families in her community fall deeper and deeper into poverty as coal jobs disappeared. And he is ignoring Scotty Monteith, 17, who mourned three victims of flash floods in Kentucky last year, including the 15-year-old Trinity High School student Davey Albright and a cab driver who was swept into the viaduct outside of Scotty’s church.

McConnell is right about one thing: The Green New Deal proposes a dramatic transformation of our economy. If we reach 2 degrees Celsius of warming above pre-industrial global temperature, as scientists are predicting, then by 2100 the U.S. would be losing an estimated $500 billion annually according to a report from President Donald Trump’s own administration. While the proposed policies may require a significant investment, the cost of inaction is much greater. The Green New Deal is the only plan that meets the scale of the crisis we currently face.

The resolution is as much about economic sustainability as it is about environmental safeguarding. Working- and middle-class Americans who already bear the brunt of climate catastrophes and a failed economic system have the most to gain from the Green New Deal. The resolution does not propose to leave Kentucky’s coal miners and cattle farmers unemployed; it proposes to add green energy jobs to our employment sector and offer support to ranchers and farmers to make their practices more sustainable. It is responsive to the changing economic needs of real Americans.

Meanwhile, McConnell says he will oppose the bill, but has not offered any alternatives to address our concerns. No, Mitch’s idea of an economic plan for Kentucky is business as usual: failing coal towns with polluted water and crumbling infrastructure, with no plans to bring more diverse, modern jobs to Kentucky, as he pockets the wealth from the fossil fuel industry to the tune of $3.3 million dollars since 1989. The Kentuckian who stands to benefit most from this plan is McConnell himself.

So here’s what we want to know: What is Mitch McConnell’s plan for Kentucky? What will it take to get him to take his constituents seriously? And if he’s so passionate about having a hearing on the Green New Deal, when will he hold a town hall meeting here in our state so that we can talk as a community about what this resolution means to us?

If our senator doesn’t come to us, we’ll keep coming to him. We will hold our own town halls, hold our own public meetings (the next one for the Sunrise Louisville hub is this Saturday, March 9, at 10 a.m. at Central Presbyterian Church). The Green New Deal is our generation’s best hope at preventing climate catastrophe within our lifetimes. If McConnell continues to prioritize his billionaire donors over our futures, we'll remember that when it comes time to ask for our votes.

'You live here, you worry':Lake Cumberland levels raise fears of dam break, despite reassurances

Hayden Flanery and Kristen Cherry are co-coordinators of the Sunrise Movement Louisville hub.

