I read Monday’s article on the two Green Party candidates, Ed McGaa and Ray Tricomo, with great interest. I hope anyone else who read it came away, as I did, with the strong impression that there’s more to the Greens than saving the environment.

Few of Tricomo’s proposals are specific enough to be useful, but some of the ideas (both Tricomo’s and McGaa’s) are absurd or even downright frightening. Tricomo’s suggestion that legislation be evaluated for its affect on the next seven generations is ludicrous. Seven generations ago, heresy was a capital crime in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Nobody at the time foresaw the day when the United States of America would be a nation. Certainly no one could have guessed that it would stretch coast to coast, invent the airplane and the computer, split the atom and enter the twenty-first century as the world’s strongest country. When Jefferson made the Louisiana Purchase, he estimated that it would take “at least a hundred generations” to populate the land. Clearly, it’s impossible to reason on a time scale so large.

McGaa’s plan to require each state to elect one senator of each gender seems to reflect a complete lack of faith in our republican form of government. Does he really think that a man is incapable of representing the interests of female constituents, or vice versa? Each state typically elects only one senator at a time, and it’s certainly not in anyone’s best interest to have elections in which only men, or only women, are allowed to run.

If you’re planning on voting for a Green Party candidate in the senate race, I urge you to reconsider. Paul Wellstone and Norm Coleman are Minnesota’s best hopes for accomplishing something meaningful in the next legislative session.