Talking to Power

Since beginning this list, others have offered good additions (you can read them if you cllick on "Comments" below this entry). I will try to keep integrating those suggestions into the list below. As I said, this is a fantasy that if I had the ear of Power, or could twist its arm, I would want it to work for certain things. Some new suggestions move this also toward a guide for our own individual behavior. Feel free to suggest additions to this list:

✔ The indigenous people who survived finally by forming The Six Nations were dedicated to the following principles (that include some of the suggestions I received) to keep in the foremost of their thoughts and to be the heart of their teachings, so that each principle might be prefaced with "Teach...": Peace. Equality. Respect. Love. Justice.
✔ Encourage a sense of wonder and discovery.
✔ Weed out racism -- one aspect of establishing economic justice for all. Take funds from war-making to create massive programs to bring opportunities and a safe environment to people of all skin colors currently in danger. Ha! To be ironic, one simple guide for the white power structure: Make all places places where "white folks" won't fear to go, and you will have eliminated racism AND poverty!
✔ Understand and protect Earth's environment and beings.
✔ Weed out sexism.
✔ Promote peace.
✔ Ignore the cynics. See that a Department of Peace becomes part of the President's Cabinet: Who would we include? Dennis Kucinich?
✔ Weed out ageism.
✔ Empower individuals to be healthy.
✔ Weed out homophobia.
✔ Create beauty and mystery.
✔ Weed out political hypocrasy.
✔ Promote kindness.
✔ Weed out religious hypocrasy.
✔ End the heartless and shameful fact of homelessness.
✔ Assert as ongoing fact a non-denominational political system.
✔ Ban the use of torture by the U.S.A. or its international surrogates.
✔ Eliminate Capital Punishment.
✔ Institute Single-Payer Universal Health Care
✔ Encourage celebration.
✔ Encourage celebration of differences of all kinds.
✔ If I may include my constant guide that I sometimes fail to live up to myself: Let us love, or at least respect, our differences, but treasure most what we hold in common.
✔ Never fail to remind people that certain USAmericans accorded book deals, lecture jaunts, and respectful introductions are former war criminals or involved in shady political or military actions. If we had a good communications system, their opinions would always be entertained with a reminder of those histories.
✔ Reverse the crimes of the Bush Regime (reinstitute Habeas Corpus, restore civil rights, restore the Posse Comitatus Act -- well, the list is much, much too long, but the editor of VANITY FAIR has maintained a comprehensive list -- and so have I.
✔ Institute voting by ranking of three candidates on the national level, and encourage it at the state and local level to break the dual-tyranny of the two-party impasse.
✔ Have all presidential primaries held on the same day -- Don't let the Iowa primary skew the national election toward the values of Iowa.
✔ Introduce youth progams, providing summer work for urban youths in the country, and summer work for country youth in urban environments.
✔ Introduce a year of national service for youth, whether in the Peace Corp, the military, or providing social aid in the U.S., as an opportunity for education, and an adventure, not as a duty. Call it The Challenge.
✔ In general, when jobs are scarce, give people public work with more than adequate pay. Much of our national infrastructure is a result of the WPA of the Roosevelt Era, and there is every reason to give despairing people, especially youth, a purpose and some hope.
✔ End poverty. Provide all citizens a living wage, not a subsistence wage.
✔ Promote and fund education -- Make "charter schools" unnecessary or no more superior than public schools. Pay teachers properly.
✔ Require commercial television and radio stations to provide greater education and exposure to the rest of the planet earth. Geography or any other subject can be made as entertaining as some of the crap currently being sold. Make obsolete the graffiti saying, "The USA learns geography through war."
✔ Get rid of the toxic elements in capitalism -- Promote awareness of the worst expressions and effects of capitalism, such as people looking at all things as having a price tag, human life seen as a series of advertisements, the training toward violence, stereotyping of people, etc., etc.
✔ People -- especially politicians: Be a future-thinker: Seek out now and eliminate the poisons at the root of some situation that will later become a problem that seems insoluable by peaceful means.
✔
Perhaps, I will also integrate some of the ideas in the belief statement of the World Pantheist Movement (WPM) at http://www.harrison.dircon.co.uk/manifest.htm