What structures support best possible living?
Jobs with reasonable expectations
It's time to end jobs that dehumanize people and expect them to work in unreasonable ways.
Jobs with unfair pay
It's time for people to demand fair pay--no one should work full time and not make enough money to put food on their table, live in a good home, afford health care and have some money left over for pleasure and recreation.
Sufficient clean natural resources
No one should have to live in a place that has polluted air, water or soil. Everywhere we need to protect our natural resources to sustain living.
Inspiring natural spaces
We know that spending good time in beautiful, natural spaces inspires the best of us. We need to preserve and maintain beautiful, natural spaces for people to enjoy.
Quality education
For too long, we have under cared for our education spaces and programs. We need to revise learning communities to ensure that educators, families and students have what they need to well educate every child in inspiring, warm, welcoming, positive ways.
Affordable, accessible health care
A healthy people are a more prosperous, happy, peaceful and good people. We have to do what we can to make optimal health care available to every citizen. We also have to protect our health care workers in ways that assures them safe, respectful work environments, fair pay and reasonable job expectations.
Non violence
Violence ends and upsets lives. Violence results in lots of money spent, money that could be used to enrich lives instead. We have to use a public health lens to clearly identify what promotes violence and how to stop it, and then we have to commit the resources needed to put an end to violence in every corner of our country.
Mitigate mental illness, discouragement, depression, loneliness
We have to attend to those in our midst who are mentally ill, discouraged, depressed or lonely. Again, taking a public health lens, we have to understand these issues more and work to change. I believe that the fact that we have undersupported children in many corners of our country has resulted in a higher level of mental illness, discouragement, depression and loneliness--we need to work to make our country a happier, energized, good people-we can do that.
Healthy recreation
Healthy, positive recreation brings life enjoyment. We need to ensure that everyone has ready access to recreation.
Promote the arts
The arts tell our story, inspire us, bring us together, create happiness and bring life meaning. We have to promote the arts via visual art, music, dance, theater, film and more.
Understand world problems with depth and history
Too often we look for quick fixes and short explanations of big, world problems when the truth is that the world's greatest problems are deep issues that have existed over time--the kinds of problems that demand worldwide understanding and collaboration to solve. We have to invest resources across the globe to solve these problems with humanity, intelligence and a will to enrich lives.
Truth matters
Some are taking advantage of the new high tech information age, by manipulating the information shared to sway public opinion in ways that prop up their personal wealth, power, privilege, pleasure and protection. These evil doers are creating havoc. We have to find easy ways to promote the truth of the matter to help people make good decisions about who and what they trust, elect, hire and follow.
Promote the good and revise as needed
What is good is a continually evolving notion, but we must all promote as much good as we can thinking about our actions and the effects our actions have on others. As we learn more about this, we have to regularly revise so that we are promoting as much good as possible rather than promoting ideas, actions, beliefs that cause hurt, harm, danger, destruction and unnecessary death.
There is limitless ways to make better. Often our desires for a better world are obstructed by those who are narrow minded, self serving and blinded to the good possible. We have to revise the structures in society to better who we are and the direction we are headed. We can all contribute to this and we must.