Sure, we've got Freedom and we've got Democracy, and when these things work as they're meant to, it's a wonderful thing. But that's not really the issue. The issue, as I see it, is that America isn't taking care of Americans-- the culture and the society and the businesses that define both are incredibly short sighted, and it's already resulting in a massive amount of unhealthy and poorly-informed people. What's the point in having all this freedom and democracy if we don't know what to do with it?
Obama is trying very hard to fix healthcare, and that's a very good thing, even if he's only partially successful, but like Michael Pollan pointed out, the reason we need so much healthcare is because the Food Business is making bad choices that are sort of polluting the populace. But it can still be fixed, if alot of linked things are tackled in the same way healthcare is. Here's my plan, and it's probably very long-term, and I know it depends on people not being idiots in big groups (which seems to be nearly impossible), but that's the thing about dreams and ideals: they can be big.
Healthcare: continue as we have been, and keep improving coverage, safety, access and everything, with an eye toward getting every citizen and those here legally (at least, probably illegals, too, but immigration is another issue I don't have any set opinions on yet) the covereage they need to stay healthy. Shift the focus to prevantative medicine, allowing people to catch and change things before they go bad instead of basically waiting until they're dying or broken to see a doctor. Herd out the doctors that are only in it for the money, and replace them with people who actually want to help their fellow humans (I'll leave it up to the profession to decide how this part works). Run national ad campaigns to get the idea out to kids deciding what they want to be that they can become doctors and that the country needs them, the same way they have the campaigns getting people to join the armed services.
Governmental Reform: Clean out all the people who aren't doing anything. Cut back on all the waste. Form new entities that can keep up with the change in the world and manage the greening and improving of our country. Foster self-sufficiency at all levels so that the whole of the govornment is sleeker and better functioning. Improve checks and balances. Keep strict reviews that make sure no one is abusing their power. Get people informed and involved so less are taken advantage of. Foster new political parties that can stand up to the entrenched old ones. Update and streamline systems. Leaders should study with foreign leaders to adapt and adopt the things that work for the leading countires in teh causes we're fostering in this plan: greening, education, human rights, health, world-responsibility, and so on. Build long-term plans that can't be undone, so that all the people who succeed this generation can keep improving, keep streamlining, keep making this a better country, instead of bogging all the plans down in new leaders undoing what the old ones did.
Food Systems: Move onto the root causes of American's sicknesses, including howe we eat and how we grow and process our foods. Get the health professionals behind it. Bombard the public with the real truths about eating healthy, not the half-truth slants that we usually get, and really seriously fine the coumpanies that make bad things sound good. Tax junk food-- even a little tax will go a long way with so much junk food out there. Require big companies to use local products as much as possible, and to process them only as much as needed, not into unrecognizability. Give benefits to those who comply and fine those who don't.
Foodshed Education: Get cities and neighborhoods and all schools-- not just elementary schools in crunch-granola areas-- involved in the local food sources they have. Make it the pride of the area. Encourage the return of artisan foods. Give benefits to small companies that meet the needs of their communities with local products, and encourage people to purchase them. Set up community gardens wherever there's space, and communal composting to feed these gardens. Get those who need to do community service-- all of them, from kids trying to get scholarships to people working off crimes-- to work the gardens and the intra-city produce network. Take the burden of feeding us away from the big companies that keep poisoning us, and actively put it back in the hands of the people. Send everyone information on their local resources on a monthly or quarterly basis. Foster massive community involvement.
Environmentalism: Encourage people to go from learning about food to learning about other green changes they can easily make-- greywater systems and rainbarrels will be easy when they see them used in the community gardens. Run competitions to see what city can be the greenest-- How much power can they get from solar, wind or water? Where can tehy plant gardens and trees and set up parks? How much of their food can they grow themselves? How many local and sustainable businesses can they encourage? Get city leaders from the ones lower on the list to visit the ones higher and see how they did it and how it can be applied to themselves. Hand out awards, make it public, get people involved. Up the number of green changes that allow people to get tax breaks, and extend the rules about cities and their green spaces. Get the populace behind major green innovations, like wind farms and wave farms and bioreactors and algae farms and mining old landfills for natural gas and recycleables and whatever else-- the bigger and more daring, the better. After the cities are improved, move on to getting those cities to help fix the world, encouraging Americans to take responsibility for what our lifestyle has done outside our borders and getting them to help make it right.
School Reform: Expand the education fields, rather than restricting them. People who grow up learning how things work are more likely to care when they stop working, so teach them more science, more engineering, more nature studies. Teach kids art and personal expression. Get schools out in the community to build monuments and gardens and beautify their cities. Teach citizenship and how the govornment is supposed to work and critical thinking, and encourage kids to grow up involved in their local govornments so when they're old enough to vote, they know what they're doing-- we especially need to get people all over the country to be able to understand what polical speak means so we can't so easily be led astray. Expand education as much as humanly possible. We need well-rounded people to run the future, people who understand the world, not people who can't find Germany or don't know how things started. Recruit teachers, librarians, adjuncts, professors, instructors the way the military is recruited, and pay them better, with more benefits and more freedom-- the future is literally in their hands and dependent on their ability to teach children well.
Mandatory Education: Make Community college or the first two years of a four year college mandatory because it changes how you think about things and expands on the basic educations you recieve up to that point. Make study abroad at least once between starting highschool and graduating college mandatory, because living in another country changes how you view everything. Make at least some trade school mandatory, so people can always have a physical skill to fall back on. You can never learn too much-- that should be our motto.
Civil Involvement: Teach people how things work, and they'll want them to be improved. We need good citizens, not sheep. Everything happening in this country is supposed to be for us, and we need to start embrasing both our power and our responsibilities. We need a country-wide remake, a cleaning-up and updating, and we need the people to be behind that so it can't fail or be lip-serviced out of existence.
And voila! Shiny new country full of the smartest, freest, healthiest, best-kept and well-educated people a nation could hope for! It won't be easy-- in fact, it'll probably be the hardest thing our country has done since declaring indipendence-- but it's something that needs to be done now, when we still have a choice, rather than later, when we have to react or die and have little control over how things go. We want to preserve all the things that make America great, while adding to the list and bringing up new generations who believe in the new ways. Things have to change, guys. It's the only constant in life. We should take control of our change and bend it to the goals we need to have, rather than letting it slip away from us and ruin what we have.
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