Vote for your future

At the beginning of the many meetings I attend there is a motion to approve the agenda. Simply put, it is a plan of what the meeting will cover, discuss, resolve and implement. Every member can add or subtract from the agenda and items may be amended, revised, tabled or even struck.

Every one of us has our own agenda, from dealing with our daily living needs all the way to expressing our global views and everything that lies in between. Our government also has an agenda during its term in office. We may agree or disagree but nonetheless there must be some agenda to work with. My hope would be that their agenda would focus on doing what is in the best interest of the majority of the American people.

However, the views of the minority should never be disregarded and perhaps may even augment and improve on any resolution. Sadly, I feel with the current administration this fundamental principle has been ignored.

In my opinion, the agenda should focus on the well-being of our citizens. We should feel safe so we need a strong agenda, not only for this pandemic, but also for those that will come in the future. An agenda ensuring good, accessible, affordable health care must be an integral part of this strategy. We should have an agenda to avoid hunger, minimize poverty, eliminate ignorance, safeguard our transportation and communication highways.

Yet we also benefit from an agenda to preserve and protect a strong economy because this provides employment and personal income. In my lifetime, I have witnessed the American economy fluctuate but primarily progress. However, this has led to an everincreasing division of extreme wealth sequestered by a powerful minority, an enlarging minority sinking deeper into poverty and a majority that functions from paycheck to paycheck. This group has been hit hard by the current viral crisis as they do not have the sav

ings necessary to get them through next month or even next week. Their agenda has dramatically changed to one where daily survival for their families is the only item they are able to address.

I see a much different agenda from our current administration. It’s an agenda that places self before others, that promotes image above action, that accepts lies as being close enough to the truth. The urgent demands of protecting the environment, climate change, energy conservation and research, sustaining the stability of our seniors, maintaining and expanding health care – among a myriad of other humanitarian efforts for our citizens and our planet – have been abandoned, forgotten and ignored as not necessary nor valued.

And now we face a hurried, rash, hypocritical agenda to pack the Supreme Court; not with an impartial, apolitical, contemplative jurist of vast experience but instead with a strongly conservative, opinionated originalist judge whose other asset is youth guaranteeing a long tenure on the court.

The law, of course, does not succumb to public opinion but the Supreme Court’s reason for

existence was to be a last resort for those seeking justice and to ensure that each branch of government recognizes the limits of its own power. In other words, it is not to be a tool of political parties either via Congress nor the presidency. The current manipulation will guarantee that often the agenda of the minority will overrule that of the majority of citizens who place the civil rights of each of us foremost.

Recall that our Constitution starts, “We, the people” – that includes all of us, not just a select few that have placed their own selfish agenda above all else and forsaken the premise stated in our Declaration of Independence that all are created equal and deserve a voice that cries out for fairness, respect and true justice.

I want all to vote their conscience but most importantly please find an avenue to vote. It is your voice and your contribution to promoting an agenda that is by the people and for the people – that means you and I and our children who are our future and our hope.