Let's Work Toward A Better World

We naturally rally to cries of “Save Democracy,” “Protect Our Rights,” and so on. These are critical values to me, and I bet, to nearly all of us.

Yet, one of our nagging challenges is how to inspire younger folks.

Leah Greenberg, co-founder of Indivisible, has a radically different approach. Many Zoomers and Millennials, maybe even younger Gen Xs, drawing from their life experiences, have suffered over the last 20 years in ways that we Boomers mostly avoided. For them, it’s tough to buy a home, the price of higher education is through the roof, financial security is out of reach (even as net worths grow on paper), Social Security heading into financial headwinds.

So, rather than fighting for the return of pre-Trump America, maybe we should turn our focus to the longer term, to building a world that’s better for all.

I don’t have a blueprint for a “world that’s better for all,” of course. That’s above my pay grade. I think some essential elements include a much stronger national health-insurance program, beyond the ACA; a strong program for affordable housing; curtailment of money in politics, and the gerrymandering that it prompts; passage of legislation, even Constitutional Amendments, that no one is above the law, whether a president, billionaire, or a regular person; rethinking of gun rights, which have become the right to kill in too many places; giving women control over their own health; a sane immigration policy.

Our current situation echoes with parallels to the American Civil War. The confederates went to war rather than live in a better world, i.e., one without slavery. The North initially sought simply to keep those 11 traitorous confederate states in the Union.

I can’t predict what might have happened had the war ended early, through negotiation or military victory.

But it did not, and as the bodies, blue and grey alike, piled higher, the fight became about even more than preservation. The Union found itself creating a revolution, a revolution against the old, corrupt order, that resulted in emancipation for millions. Through the deadly war, said President Lincoln, America “shall have a new birth of freedom.” Is today similar? I think so.

We have the opportunity to reshape our country. Be aware that our opponents seek to make America less free, less fair, and less prosperous (for us non-oligarchs), and they are willing to ditch our Constitution to neuter the power of the federal government… and give Trump more power. It is up to us to build a better world, while opposing the imposition of a
worse one.

The Force is with us. Can we win? Well, as my alter ego Han Solo would say, “Never tell me the odds!”

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