It’s taken a while but America is picking up steam and some optimism, finally.
With our nation as divided as it was, the outlook wasn’t good. For some of us it still may not be, but the gap is closing as we start to see the dawn after this long dark night of COVID, a chaotic and divisive presidential term, and a tough election.
In the new light we may agree that what’s really important is: Planetary health, our planetary civilization as a whole, America as part of that planetary civilization, and America’s people as a whole. None of us can ever prioritize these things in any other way or for any reason whether personal, professional, or political, because these points are crucial to life at large as well as to America’s health, strength and global standing.
We’ve all talked before about the verbiage that was the thumb on the scale of our nation’s people even as the framers of the Constitution wrote it up. We all realize that even as time has marched on, there have always been those who wish to see things go backwards or, at least, stagnate. As a nation, however, equality, freedom and a fair chance for all can never be abandoned as the ultimate goal. We must legislate that of which we boast.
We’ve talked before about the power of excessive wealth in this nation and the corporate piracy that has made the worker a second class citizen. The pirates would like to see America remain stagnant in that way and they’ve been highly successful as proven by corporate wealth and workers’ hourly wages over the past several decades. While the top tier walks off with pie, they pit the small guys one against the other for the crumbs, and they’d not only like to keep it that way, they’re trying to figure out how to make more pies without giving up any more crumbs.
They invest in further decadent indulgences through paid legislation. The nation’s population will eventually become a class structure of mega-trillionaires with too much and a second class of enough poor to perform the subservient tasks and services they need done for them – and done as cheaply as possible to boot. That’s their dream but it’s not the American dream. That’s not what most of us think of as American and it’s not the America most of us are working to achieve.
The majority of Americans are just looking for a fair slice of that pie while remaining more altruistic and realistic. We work and pay our taxes. We simply want the corporations (which, by the way, are not people and should not be legislated as such) to do the same on the sliding scale that is necessary for equilibrium. The existing perk, which allows corporations and billionaires to buy breaks from the leadership they support, must end. Such corporate lobbying advantages were never intended, let alone intended to be so overt, expansive, deeply rooted, or legal. And, they certainly cannot be irreversible.
It can’t be legal for rotating doors to make corporate lobbyists and legislators interchangeable. It should never be legal for a member of the family that owns one of the largest international transportation/shipping companies in the world to also be the Secretary of Transportation, but it happened. Only recently voluntarily retired, she was married to the Republican Senate leader to boot. That’s only one example – and, yes, that kind of conflict of interests should be barred from both sides of the aisle.
No administration is ever going to be completely pure or achieve perfection in anything. For many of us, our new president may not have been our personal choice, but we can find our comfort in him as the next best thing or in a fresh start. Fresh blood is always, at least, a shot at something better when what we had wasn’t working, and change is always accompanied by hope.
As for the people’s slice of that pie, we’ll take it because we’ve earned it and, insomuch as we’re all entitled to what we work for, we simply refuse to fight over the crumbs. It’s one thing to come up with a great idea; it’s another to fairly compensate the people who help you make it a reality every day. America’s low wage workers have too long been at the mercy of the corporate giants who should never be above the law.
Change … we embrace it for the hope it brings.
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