10 Things to talk about besides Trump

                I said before that I think we need to spend more time talking about how we change and rebuild than we do focusing on Trump.  Well, here are ten suggestions, in reverse order of importance, that I think are more important and that I would like to work on and talk about.  I’m sure you have your own list.

10.  Free College and Millennial Debt:  We’ve reached the point that a college education should be free.  If people want to tie that to a couple years of national service in some variety of efforts (not all military), that is fine with me.  But we need to get to the point where we help students of all ages transition through the education they need and that we need them to have to be functioning members of a democratic country.  Along with that we should start excusing the debt Millennials have had to take on to get a degree.  As a generation, they got slammed by the rise in tuition brought on by shrinking public dollars in education and a job market that left them few options.  If this economy is going to recover, it has to free the economic power of Millennials from the mountain of debt that is holding them back.

9.  Infrastructure:  This one is too obvious, but it can’t just be infrastructure in the traditional sense.  Sure, we need roads and bridges and airports, but we also need new means of transportation and broad band access everywhere.  We are, at best, a mid-twentieth century power in infrastructure.

8.  Education:  Our education system has become a market for textbook and testing companies at the expense of our students.  We need to rethink schools from the bottom up following some epistemological principle that doesn’t begin and end in a test.  We need to stop the war on teachers and invite them back into the conversation.  Right now, our education merely replicates the socio-economic status of the parents.  We are not preparing our children to think about and inhabit the world that awaits.

7. Multi-Party System:  Our political system is broken.  In order to fix it, we need to find a way to give more people a voice.  Two parties won’t do that, especially when one of them is radically undemocratic.  We need to start transitioning to a multi-party system of government, one more flexible and more responsive to the people.

6.  Guns:  We are the only country in the world that has this problem.  We need to find a way to talk the gun people back off the ledge that the NRA has falsely constructed.  We have to find a way to reduce gun violence.  This is a tough conversation to even get started, but it will only happen in a face to face dialog.

5.  Energy Shift:  We are in the middle of the shift from oil to natural gas, with the beginnings of the shift from natural gas to renewables already underway.  The shift is more economic than it is environmental at this point.  Trump can no more resurrect coal than he can stop automation.  We need to accelerate  these shifts – including phasing out plastic in all but the most essential areas.  It might also finally silence the Koch brothers.

4.  Economic Inequality:  Democracy is not possible with the distribution of wealth that exists and is getting worse.  Unless we are willing to change laws and regulate the financial industry, we will cease to be a democratic nation.  We already aren’t really even capitalistic any more.  Our economy is more monetarist that capitalist.  More of our decisions have to reflect the real interests of the majority.

3.  AI and Work:   I’m tempted to put this first, because it’s the monster lurking under the bed.  Automation has already permanently altered manufacturing, but when you combine it with AI and move it into the rest of the economy, the impact will be devastating.  Whole areas of ‘work’ will disappear, and not in the old sense of new jobs sprouting up in new places, they will just disappear.  Some estimates are that 50% of the existing jobs will be gone in 10-20 years.  Some say that’s conservative.  When I was a kid, ‘utopia’ was always work free.  Now that we may almost be there, that future looks anything but ‘utopian.’

2.  Single-Payer Health Care:  This has to stop.  The rest of the industrialized world has figured this one out.  It’s not hard.  It’s not that complicated.

1.  Climate:  In many ways this is obvious.  The less obvious part of it is that this isn’t going to happen without a cultural reckoning with fundamentalist Christianity.  As with so many of the items on this list, the problem either exists or is exacerbated by a form of Christianity that is opposed to change – and in many ways opposed to the things we always thought were ‘Christian.’  

                The cultural shift we’re a part of has a lot of moving parts.  What connects all of them is that the underlying narrative has gone bad.  We need a new story.  That story should minimally account for what is listed here.  I’m sure I’ve left out important issues or phrased things the wrong way – so be it.  Make your own list.  Tell the next person who wants your vote or your money to answer to it.