FROM MY CORNER

The 2020 presidential election is not going to be about making America great again. America has never stopped being great. This election is going to explore how to demonstrate that America is great.

America is geographically huge and essentially empty. Ninety percent of us live in large crowded cities. In between are vast empty spaces of beautiful land. In these, with sound investment and science, thousands of small sustainable communities could be created to provide private manufacturing and other jobs and homes for millions of new American citizens.

Our cities have historically served the financial purpose of fostering low cost labor to enhance profits of corporations. This policy has created and nurtured petrified rural patches and city ghettos of homeless, poor, and poorly educated Americans.

The Statue of Liberty states, “Give us your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to be free.” It does not say, “Build walls to keep them out.” Instead, the 2020 election is going to be about how America can help unite the world’s nations in accommodating the planet’s poor, its homeless, its war refugees.

2020 is an election to demonstrate American alternatives to being divided into warring camps. How our economic, political, and cultural future remains as it has always been: to nurture America’s tangibly established values and export them to the world.

There is much debate on the U.S. political stage about values: religious values, political values, economic values. One perspective states that America means it when she says, “Give us your huddled masses.”

Another denies this premise, and creates an egocentrically nationalized closed-door political philosophy specifically designed to further enrich an already obscenely wealthy minority of corporate and political allies.

Our most fundamental starting point from which to begin defining our real core values is in our personal religious beliefs. For it is from this specific point our founders set out to guide us in our constitutional experiment of Democracy.

In the first Virginia law of Religious Freedom, penned by Thomas Jefferson, Tom states:

That therefore the proscribing any citizen as unworthy the public confidence, by laying upon him an incapacity of being called to offices of trust and emolument, unless he profess or renounce this or that religious opinion, is depriving him injuriously of those privileges and advantages, to which, in common with his fellow citizens, he has a natural right,

Implicit in this basic American principle is the belief that each person is to be judged individually based on his or her particular combination of characteristics and values. No generic religion or belief is to be singled out as undesirable.

Any denial by any subculture in America of this basic principle of human decency and justice is anti-American. Any individuals disputing this principle create an anti-American suspicion about themselves.

There is no room in America for bigotry. There is no room for violence and terrorism to forward any cause. There is no room for sexual domination. There is no room for inordinate force in the exercise of legitimate authority.

These are examples of issues that will form the substance of the 2020 Presidential Election. In my own commentaries, “From My Corner,” I will be exploring such issues until the 2020 election.

Your online literate contribution to my effort is invited. I do not intend to present a series of political speeches. Rather, I intend to foster an interactive open dialogue with those reading my writings and viewing my videos.

The America I envision is a collaborative land. There is literally room in this country to double our population and economically sustain ourselves for millennia more. We can do this by manufacturing and marketing at reasonable prices the highest possible quality goods and services our country and an evolving world need.

The 2020 election is about whether Americans want America to support only extremely wealthy or to include common people: whether our values identify with increasing luxury for an egocentric few, or with equitably advancing the sustainable future of our entire population and the worldwide human race.

This will be an essential political battle of Haves against Have-Nots. And any Haves who do not recognize and embrace to themselves the intrinsic value of including all Have-Nots, as necessary and integral economic members of the race of humankind, are themselves of dubious value.

The survival of the civilized fittest demands the survival of all. Pursuing anything less is unacceptable. Pursuing anything less is decidedly not civilized.