For MVP Kamala Harris.
I love seeing you and Walz out being joyful. It’s absolutely the right way to go.
I’d feel better if you could move in public more safely. Please renew efforts to stop the spread of COVID, including tracking, mandatory testing for hospital inpatients at start/end of stay, routine staff testing, and more importantly promote masks, mask alternatives, and filtration of indoor air, with priority to public schools.
Please also fund and fast track Long Covid research and treatments, excluding testing exercise as a treatment. (Testing to see if treatments help exercise tolerance is fine. Testing to see if exercise helps recovery is not. It has failed every single time for the last 40 years of “research” done on patients with ME/CFS characterized by Post Exertional Malaise. It has confirmed that adding exercise actually damages bodies and minds to the point where recovery is less possible.) People don’t become sick because they’re sedentary. People become sedentary because they’re sick. Medical dogma has this backwards. Making sick people perform wellness doesn’t create well people. Preventing preventable diseases, curing curable ills & mitigating disabilities with gladly provided assistance creates maximally well people.
Wars are bad for people, the environment, and economies. I wish we’d stop saying that WWII kickstarted US power/wealth when the New Deal (even if applied unequally), social safety nets, putting limits on banks & Robber Barons’ wealth (Billionaires in today’s parlance), investment in infrastructure, and being half a world away from most bombing did it. This shouldn’t need to be said, but help Ukraine fight off Putin & help Palestinians survive. Everyone knows that we, the US, can stop Israel’s genocide of Gaza. We need to stop it. The best time would have been Oct 9th. The next best time is now. Ceasefire immediately.
I’m tired of seeing titans of American influence and industry being strip mined for short term shareholder profits. I’m tired of people being bankrupted for education and illness or disability. I’m tired of watching the world burn, and not just kicking the can down the road on how to stop it, but denying the world is on fire at all or denying that we should stop deliberately burning it. I’m tired of re-fighting for the human rights advances of 1865 (all people are people, with rights to bodily autonomy), 1919 (yes, even women), 1968 (yes, even the Black babies), 1973 (yes, even people pregnant with babies), 2010, (yes, even the LGBTQ soldiers, 2015, (yes, even the non-soldier LGBTQ people).
Every moment we spend re-fighting (needless) fights for bodily autonomy (as they should long since be settled law) is a moment we aren’t planning for our futures. Every dollar spent fighting because we’re allowing Fox News et al to spew their poison for free, is a dollar we’re not spending on the health and education of the nation. Every moment we make catastrophic climate decisions so we can keep oil money propping up the dollar as the world’s reserve currency is a moment we’re stealing from our kids’ futures.
Progress towards more rights for more people is always acceptable. Yet 1 in 6 kids is food insecure here. We imprison more people by % than any other country. We still haven’t closed out GitMo prisons and the Bush/Cheney/Loo torture doctrine. In addition to being gross, unprofessional, and unproductive, it’s all *embarrassing*. As annoying as it is to keep fighting to insist that marginalized folks deserve equal rights, up until recently, we were gaining. I keep hoping the recent backsliding is an ‘extinction burst’, a last gasp of a failed regime before we step into the future and give equality the old college try. When you win, let’s stop the pathetic rumblings of white supremacy by codifying rights, for real this time (without the prison loophole for slavery) try a Green New Deal, with a little nuclear power, as a treat, and push for a future with clean air, a cleaner climate, and space to have hobbies that don’t have to be monetized for survival.
The Dem pattern is to get enough people elected to enact an agenda, then let [Harry Reid, Manchin & Sinema] turn coat and stop most Dem progressive agendas, even the too-far-right ones. We can’t keep doing that. We must solidify gains. You & Walz and the next generation of Democratic leaders need to figure out how, after you figure out how to hold the White House when (🤞🏽) you win.
My student loans have been paid back for years, but aside from increasing salaries ($25 min wage, including waitstaff & farmhands), cutting private equity out of landlording, curbing the price of groceries, a modest UBI for all resident adults ($3000/month on top of existing social services, for a start), taxing passive income & finance more heavily, and don’t forget stopping both Covid & fixing Long Covid, the single biggest boost for the economy would be cancelling all student loans & making public college & trade schools (including nursing & cosmetology) free for students, well funded by us.
Millennials control barely 5% of the wealth of the nation. At their age, Boomers controlled over 25% of US wealth. What worked for Boomers not only won’t, but can’t work now, until we divest from preying on schools & students. Most economic models don’t seem to factor in the absolute disaster of sending our best and brightest into young adulthood already saddled with the equivalent of a mortgage. (Certification creep can be discussed later.) It’s both scary and baffling to see pundits & economists talk about the younger generations delaying or missing major adult milestones without ever connecting the dots to predatory student loans. Every $1 spent on education returns about $8 to the economy. It’s worth investing public money in education at all levels.
Our economy would TAKE OFF if all student loans were just canceled tomorrow. Add in a UBI kicker (Every $1 sent to someone in poverty returns more than $1 to the economy. Every $1 given to the investor class decreases that dollar’s value in the economy more than 10%. It’s part of why & how our industries chasing shareholder profits are helping Long Covid in collapsing the economy. We should still send the UBI to everyone, no means testing, no purity testing, yes even addicts, layabouts, and felons, because it’s cheaper and more effective that way.) and with a lot more of your contagious joy and we’d be back to being unstoppable without having to disappear protester leaders into cop cities (which absolutely will happen if we don’t stop those abominations) or without needing to let Israeli soldiers keep sniping Doctors, Aid Workers, Professors, Press, and, I cannot stress this enough, Toddlers. They’re sniping toddlers on our watch. Please make them stop.
We’ll be able to stand behind you when we can all afford a safe place to stay and food for the foreseeable future. Joy is easier when community, including government, works for the people, all the people, yes, even those people.
I haven’t even hit needing to stop the “War on Drugs”, a mindset that needs rethinking. Prohibition is more dangerous than regulated supply. Criminalizing addiction prevents rehab. We can be smarter and kinder about how we regulate and educate about currently illicit drugs. We can let people in prison for drug charges out. We can live with pot (& probably coke) much more safely and productively than we can live with Covid.
I know this is too long. The world is in chaos with not enough people putting forth vision for a better future. You have a slog and a half in front of you. Give me, give us, the promise of a better, more joyful tomorrow by course correcting. Please.
