America Needs To Take The Holidays To Search Its Soul | By Louie Overstreet

America Needs To Take The Holidays To Search Its Soul

BY LOUIE OVERSTREET

Louie Overstreet

America, as a functioning democracy, needs to seriously search its soul. Further, too many of us chose not to do anything when we witnessed Trump damn near bludgeon democracy to death.

First, we have to stop opposing good ideas on the sole basis of whether they were proposed by a Democrat or a Republican.

America, and we as citizens, need to reflect upon how the following crisis level needs can be addressed, based on good ideas that produce positive outcomes.

• Treat the defeat of COVID-19 as our nation’s top priority.
• Immediately improve the living standards of caged immigrant children and make every effort to reunite them with their parents. Personally, I think Stephen Miller should be charged with crimes against humanity and brought to trial at the Hague.
• Amend, not end the Affordable Care Act.
• Demand that our federal government come up with a plan that is the economic equivalent of Roosevelt’s New Deal and finance it with revenue generated by repealing Trump’s tax giveaway plan that he signed into law in December 2017.
• Pass a new Bill of Rights for veterans, with priorities on health care and jobs.
• We should stop using sayings that are no longer true about America: “This is not who we are.” Also, “We are better than this.” Clearly we are not.
• Stop believing lying is an acceptable new normal.
• America needs to stop paying the mind-boggling cost of racism that harms us here at home and places us at a tremendous competitive disadvantage internationally.
• Stop believing scientific knowledge is the bogeyman.
• Congress should make the restoration of provisions of the 1965 Voting Rights Act gutted by the SCOTUS, a priority.
• Pass a law making it illegal not to pay equal wages for the same work.
• Pass a law establishing a livable, means tested, national minimum wage.
• Rescind all executive orders issued by Trump that lessened the effectiveness of environmental standards and those that removed America’s participation in international organizations.
• Establish a commission to study our presently unjust justice system.

If we fix the above, America’s “better angels” will soar again.