In my radical view of the future, or the normal view in current day Jamie World, two evolutions will take place - the elimination of Identity Politics and of US military bases or military involvement in any country outside of ours.
I cringe when I hear my left-wing friends say, or when I read political views that say the Dems need to work harder to get the ______ (Insert identity here: Black, Latino, Gay, Native American, Southern, Gay, Transgender) vote.
How about policies that just help everyone who has been denied equal opportunity? Discrimination against any of us should be an affront to all of us. And policies to address such inequities should be sweeping. For too long, policies that help the privileged/highest earners have been excused by saying "a rising tide lifts all boats." Well, instead of adding water to help the yachts, how about we focus on the dinghies and rowboats, especially if they need to be bailed out to begin with?
That said, I have no problem giving priority to appointing/hiring people from the disadvantaged classes where all else is relatively equal ahead of those of us in the more privileged classes, even though that approach has negatively impacted me personally in the past.
As far as the military is concerned, I used to have a friend Mike - the producer of Flyers' telecasts - who would say when talk would turn to our foreign military entanglements, "Let me know when they land on the Jersey Shore." And more and more, that is my feeling too. I hope is that someday, there is a major Presidential candidate who espouses the view that all our troops should come home to defend our country from here and return most of them to civilian status. Far right conservatives would have a knee-jerk group head explosion, but the way to appease/convince them would be to point out that it would balance the budget in about a year and a half. And I think many of them who already have a libertarian streak would approve regardless.
Now, would that make us weaker? No, the military would then take on a role in addition to protecting our shorelines. When world crises hit, we would be there to help. Famine, earthquakes, tsunamis, plagues - at the invitation of any foreign government, we would make available whatever resources in funds and personnel to do our best to help them. Not by giving them monies, which might fall in the wrong hands. Well, actually, we do know it would - to the pockets of the powerful. So we would bring our people in to work with them, even paying their workers directly, to rebuild or provide and distribute aid also directly, on our conditions.
If you had a neighbor who was doing things to help neighbors of yours who were impacting you negatively, wouldn't you resent that neighbor as much or more than the one they were helping? And wouldn't one be far more likely to try to exact revenge on them in some way? But if your only approach was to be helpful to everyone in your neighborhood, do you think people would treat you better or worse? Sure, there are still bad people in the world, and likely in your neighborhood. But we're talking about odds here. Are people more likely to attack the USA if all we do is help people or if we get militarily involved to help other countries' enemies?
I know how naïve it sounds, and at times it would be. But it couldn't be any worse than the current policies that have cost us tens of thousands of lives and trillions and trillions of dollars, with no end in sight.
Who will be the first to have the courage to embrace such a concept? And how many decades from now?
