The United Hates of America

Imagine you are in a conference room sitting around a large table with 24 other randomly selected people from your community. A facilitator enters the room and asks for a show of hands if you agree with each of the following:

• The food we buy (groceries or restaurants) should be safe to eat.
• Water from the tap should be good tasting and free of harmful chemicals.
• You should feel safe and secure in your home, in your community, and when you travel.
• People should be able to afford safe and decent housing.
• People who have spent a lifetime working should not have food, housing, or medicine insecurity during their retirement years.
• Bribery and corruption of public officials, judges, and/or law enforcement is an attack on the system should be a major criminal offense with severe civil and criminal penalties.
• Massive amounts of money dumped into political campaigns have a corrupting influence on any government and should not be permitted.
• People seeking our trust through our purchases, our investments, our donations, or our votes should be honest and act with integrity.
• Our children and our grandchildren should be well-educated and prepared for a dynamic, challenging, and competitive global future.
• As a community, we recognize our children and grandchildren have different skills, talents, and capabilities. To serve the future needs of the community and our society there should be multiple affordable world-class educational pathways for the next generation. For example, some will prefer theoretical paths in mathematics, science, and research, some will prefer careers in law, healthcare, education, or as first responders, and some will prefer applied paths in construction and manufacturing.
• Any system of taxes should be fair. A teacher or an electrician shouldn’t pay a higher percentage of their income in taxes than a billionaire or banker.
• Government should account for how our tax money is collected and how it is spent. Taxes represent our investment in our society and should produce value. Corruption and misuse of public funds are a betrayal of public trust and should include severe civil and criminal penalties.
• Our economic policies should encourage smart and careful growth that provides societal value and opportunities for upward mobility for all.
• Any meaningful form of democracy requires every one of us to be educated (and does not have to be formal), informed (evidence-based fact, not propaganda), and civically engaged.
• Healthcare should be affordable, patient-centered, and produce consistently good results for individuals and overall society. A person or family should not be financially ruined by a catastrophic illness or condition.
• We should be working toward continuous improvement, a better, more peaceful, and more secure future for our children, grandchildren, and generations yet to come.
• We don’t want a big government or a small/weak government. We want a transparent, accountable, and right-sized government built on protecting the principles of democracy, justice, fairness, equality, and liberty.
• The current system is broken, corrupted by money, and is now serving billionaires, special interests and political parties -not “We the People”.

Aside from the people whose arms tire, most, if not all in the room would still have raised hands. There are common things most all people want and when we gather into small groups and practice “Kitchen Table Democracy” -we are much closer as a society than you would be led to believe by corporate and social media (which rely on conflict, propaganda, and disinformation to generate vast amounts of advertising revenue).

Whether you are conservative, liberal, moderate -regardless of political affiliation there is anger, recrimination, and polarizing hate dividing us. The current billionaire-owned concentrated media landscape profits from conflict and keeps us distracted from the growing wealth concentration which is stealing from all of us and from our future -not only in the United States -it is a global phenomenon. I may be naively optimistic, however I believe that we all have hope, dreams, and the courage to unite and continue the hard work toward a “More Perfect Union” centered around democracy, justice, and equality.

We are not going to agree on everything, and codifying and implementing much of the above is certain to lead to an array of opinions on how to move forward. Nevertheless, a journey of 1,000 miles begins with the first step. And for the truly courageous, the journey to fix our broken system begins with real conversations, reaching new understandings, and celebrating the aspirations, hopes, dreams, and future we want for ourselves, our families, society, and world.