Finished with the Silence

I've been silent for too long.  I've watched our country turn into a mess--a horrible tangle of lies and deception and self-interest that threatens to destroy everything that so many people have worked hard to build and maintain for many, many years.  Our politicians are no longer public servants--they're for the most part self-serving demagogues who are in place more often through gerrymandering and spending small fortunes on campaigns than they are through the will of the public.  Our institutions are becoming more and more discriminating and less and less inclusive.  We live in fear these days--we've lost our self-confidence and practicality that used to define America in the eyes of the rest of the world.

It's time to reclaim our country.  It's time to reclaim the compassion, the love, the strength--and I mean true strength, not the posturing and manipulative smokescreen that our current "leaders" are using to hide the fact that they're weak and ineffective.  It's time to develop strength that comes from the people of the country, not from wealth or influence or cronyism.  It's time to stop threatening each other and to return to cooperating with each other, to work to compromise to reach decisions and make policies that help to make our country stronger rather than to work only with our own political parties in order to gain more influence for ourselves.

Over the next several months, I'm going to develop a political platform that is based on the will of the people and that will have one major goal in mind:  how to make our country stronger so that our children will be a part of a nation that is kind and compassionate and that is able to compete in a changing world technologically, industrially, and in every other way possible in the fields of education, medicine, charity, human rights, opportunity, and compassion.

We've lost our way.  But the road is still there, just waiting for us to step back on it.  Over the course of the next few months--the next few years, even--I hope to be providing the groundwork that will allow our country to become once again great rather than mediocre; strong rather than weak; hopeful rather than despairing.

And I want our country to use that greatness and strength to develop a world that our children can be proud of rather than ashamed of, as they live on a planet that is healing rather than dying.  It is possible, and there are common-sense steps that we can take to make sure that it does happen.