Imagine a Better World...

Before we can fix anything else, we need a government that works for the people.

Imagine a world where you didn’t have to be afraid of getting sick. Where you had affordable healthcare, safe medication, and sick days that you could actually use. Imagine paid vacation time every year. Or even just a job that paid a living wage. One that didn’t involve the fear of imminent termination any time an executive needed to keep their bonus amid a downturn.

Imagine a world where our kids didn’t have to be afraid to go to school. Where there was no harassment and discrimination over their very identity. Where the prospect of gun violence wasn’t a real and present danger. A world where they would have every opportunity before them; from trade schools to graduate programs. Or even just a world where kids didn’t go hungry.

Imagine a world where we stewarded our natural resources so that they would be available for generations to come. A world where the food and water, land and sky were not full of deadly toxins, but were clean and pure. Imagine a world where everyone joined together to meet climate change with restoration and adaptation measures. Not just for us, but for those fleeing the global south as well, so that they could keep their homeland and provide world stability.

Imagine a world where community intervention replaced police brutality. Where rehabilitation replaced incarceration. Where every human life had inherent value. Imagine a world without war and genocide; atrocities and concentration camps. A world where peace was the first solution and reasonable compromise the second.

Imagine a world where we had real political representation that was actually concerned with solving these issues. A world where big money had no influence on politics. Where voter suppression and election interference weren’t common place. Imagine having a better system than our broken and ineffectual two-party train wreck.

Imagine if all three of those vital reforms could be solved with one Act… The group Represent Us has proposed a piece of legislation to pass through the states which does all of this; the American Anti-Corruption Act.

• It ends lobbyist bribes and secret money, cracks down on PACs and lobby loopholes. Instead, it creates public funded campaigns that put the people back in control.

• It gives party choice back to the people through ranked choice voting and voter-lead open primaries.

• It ends gerrymandering and bypasses voter suppression by automatically registering eligible voters and allowing mail-in ballots for all.

We could have all of this and more. The question is what you’re willing to work for. The ones in power aren’t going to vote themselves out of it. We the People have to step up and do it ourselves. We can use tools like voter initiated ballot measures to get it started, recall elections for lawmakers who oppose it, and quite possibly civil resistance campaigns. Protests are a great start, but they’ve not freed us from decades of neoliberal exploitation and they’re sure as hell not going to stop fascism. Look at the crowds that AOC and Bernie are pulling—people want change, we just need to band together and make it happen.

The current authoritarian push-back is a direct response to civil resistance movements all over the world that were winning. They didn’t overthrow their governments, they used wide-scale civic engagement to enact change through the democratic method. We need a civic interdiction.

That’s why the fascists have been so intent on voter suppression and election interference; they’re afraid of us. When the people realize that we hold the power, that we can have any right that we insist upon, that we constitute the soul of the nation, then we can do anything. Stop letting the oppressor tell you what you’re allowed to do and just try something. We don’t have time to wait around for political parties to reform or protests to gain critical mass. Neither our nation nor our planet will survive that long. We can do something and we can do it right now. Let’s get moving, people.

Buy me a coffee.