GOD BLESS AMERICA, LAND THAT I LOVE

            Millions and millions for electing somebody—to do nothing for poor people in America.  How many hundreds of millions have the rich spent trying to elect Hilary Clinton?  A billion?  And the not-so-rich have spent hundreds of millions more trying to elect Bernie Sanders.  The difference between the Clinton donors and the Sanders donors is that the Clinton donors expect to get all their money back—and more!  The Sanders donors want a decent society.

            Why can’t we have four week campaigns?  Other countries do, and successfully elect governments.

            If we replaced political campaigns with public work, we could begin to rebuild the United States as a decent place to live.   Maybe politics would begin to attract more decently social people who want to rebuild American society.

            Let’s pay members of congress the same thing ordinary workers earn.  And give them the same health insurance and the same retirement benefits ordinary workers have.  (Members of congress have complete health insurance and full pensions for life.  And they have long, long vacations.  And most of them get their “pocket money” from lobbyists.)

            Maybe to protect members of government, lobbyists should be required to register with the police, and have all their gifts and favors registered as criminal bribes.

            Maybe those who want military spending should be required to join the army, or the navy.  (Maybe, too, the navy shouldn’t have an air force of its own—and an army of its own, with an air force of its own!)  Let the militarists join the military.  

And all of those young people who enlist in the military because they have nothing else to do—nowhere to work—could be employed by the government to build schools and houses in our cities, or work on real farms—in agriculture, not agribusiness—to replace the huge industrial farm machines that destroy our land and pollute our rivers and streams and the air we breathe.  

And we could employ a million or more young people to go across America, collecting guns from two hundred million other Americans.

And. . . and. . . once we get started. . . .

Can we have such an America?  Of course we can.  And then the only big problem we will have is the really, really big one of how to get rid of all of our thousands of nuclear weapons.  The United States has been making and storing them now for more than seventy years.  And everybody knows that the older they get, the more dangerous they are.  So far, we don’t know how old they have to be to activate themselves—but we do know that seventy years is a long time.

How can 300,000,000 get anything so wrong as we have?  We began destroying this continent—and its people—as soon as we got here and those native Americans had taught us how to survive.  And perversely—stupidly—we sang “God Bless America” while we worked against God to destroy both this continent and this world.

The United States of America—disunited as it, with its citizens killing each other by the hundreds every day of the year—is a terrible danger to the whole world.  From its nuclear arsenal to its local home-town murderousness to its air-pollution and earth-destruction to its wide-spread poverty and general maldistribution of wealth to its impossible “national debt,”  everything about the United States is dangerous.

Can we recover?  Yes.  We can.  But we need—all of us, every last one of us—to get started now.