We don’t need ‘affordable’ healthcare. We need universal healthcare. We don’t need ‘access’ to education. We need tuition-free college and vocational training. Let’s erase the weasel words and get right to the point. The only way any of us can live in a safe, healthy society is if we all do.
Freedom and equity aren’t free. Neither is a stable society. We must reduce the extraordinary amount we spend on the military and demand that the ultra-wealthy and corporations pay their fair share toward the public good.
The alternative is to live in a country filled with poverty, homelessness, division, and unrest.
Every worker needs a living wage. But more than that, we need a thriving wage, and Universal Basic Income is a practical starting point.
We also need universal taxpayer-funded childcare and pre-k education, fare-free public transportation, automatic voter registration, elimination of the Electoral College, ranked choice voting, plus nationwide vote-by-mail as well as in-person voting.
We must provide training and new job opportunities for workers who will be displaced from fossil fuel industries as we confront an ever-worsening climate crisis. Because leaving them to fend for themselves only guarantees failure.
We pay for our choices, one way or another. Let’s use our resources wisely.
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A climate crisis immigrant who relocated from New Orleans to Seattle in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, Johnny Townsend wrote the first account of the Up Stairs Lounge fire, an attack on a French Quarter gay bar which killed 32 people in 1973. He was an associate producer for the documentary Upstairs Inferno, for the sci-fi film Time Helmet, and for the short Flirting, with Possibilities. His books include Please Evacuate, Racism by Proxy, and Wake Up and Smell the Missionaries. His novel, Orgy at the STD Clinic, set entirely on public transit, details political extremism, climate upheaval, and anti-maskers in the midst of a pandemic.