Editorial 12.3, March 2010, by Deirdre Helfferich Ten Ideas I recently received an interesting e-mail from www.change.org, detailing the results of a poll/contest in which 209,950 people voted on 2,505 ideas that they deemed most important to address for positive change in the United States. There’s a lot of groups and petitions on this website, but this was essentially a priority-setting poll:
Their top ten: 1. Legalize the Medicinal and Recreational Use of Marijuana: “Drugs should be a public health issue, not a criminal justice issue.” Indeed. I have editorialized before on the stupidity, futility, and sheer inane waste of money that the Drug War represents, particularly against cannibis. The war causes a lot of misery on the world (in the form of guns, incendiaries, imprisonment, and other violence against our own population and against that of other countries, such as Mexico and Afghanistan). 2. Move to Amend: Constitutional Rights for People, Not for Corporations - Abolish Corporate Personhood: “Human beings are people; corporations are legal fictions. The Supreme Court is misguided in principle, and wrong on the law.” This is an effort spearheaded by Move to Amend. Again, a effort I stand fully behind. And now we even have a corporation running for US Senate. I mean, how obvious can it get? 3. Increase Federal Good Time Allowances: “[R]eturn the US Federal prison system to an earlier system of good time allowances that would not only create more humane conditions for those who are incarcerated, but also relieve American taxpayers of the tax burden of unnecessarily long prison sentences. A mere 10 percent reduction of prison populations through good time allowances would save…a minimum of $1.2 billion.” I’d not heard of this one before, but it makes sense. Between the imprisonments from the drug war and mandatory sentencing, the US has more prisoners than any other country in the world. That is a shameful thing in the “Land of the Free.” 4. Send the Tobacco Treaty to the Senate for Ratification: “This treaty requires countries that have ratified it to implement scientifically proven measures to reduce tobacco use and the terrible toll it takes on a country’s lives, health and economy.” We’ve signed the treaty, but not ratified it. It doesn’t require us to throw smokers in jail, by the way, or to make smoking illegal. 5. Create 1.5 Million American Jobs by Fixing Our Crumbling Schools: “[S]olve the dual problems of unemployment in the construction industry and poor conditions in our schools…if we invest $180 billion in our schools over the next few years…we can put 1.5 million Americans back to work and improve education for every public school student in America.”I think this one could apply to a lot of our public infrastructure. 6. No Farm No Food: Save the Land that Sustains Us: “Every minute of every day, we lose two acres of agricultural land to development.” Here in the Fairbanks North Star Borough, the changes in claiming grandfather rights may threaten agricultural uses of land. Recent hearings on this brought people out of the woodwork to defend farms—but is it enough? Agricultural land gets a tax break, but residences and business developments make more money in taxes for the borough, providing a disincentive. Downtown Fairbanks used to be full of small-scale agriculture, but no more. 7. Good Food For All Kids: A Garden at Every School: “By planting a garden at every school in America, we will ensure that every child has the opportunity to benefit from eating more fresh healthy foods.” Our own Calypso Farm & Ecology Center has been working hard to maintain and expand their various schoolyard garden programs. What if this was part of the ground-zero planning for every new school in the borough? in the state? This would go a long way toward solving our food insecurity problem. 8. End Chimpanzee Experiments, Pass the Great Ape Protection Act: “Chimpanzees and other nonhuman primates are used in medical research because of the assumption that they are closest to humans in physiology. Yet nonhuman primates are profoundly different from humans at the genetic and molecular levels, where disease processes and treatment take place.” And then there’s that squishy ethical problem of subjecting our nearest relatives, animals with near-human intelligence, to institutionalized abuse. 9. Establish a U.S. Department of Peace-building “The science of peacebuilding deserves a seat at the table when it comes to making decisions about foreign and domestic policy. The use of violence to resolve personal and international conflicts needs to be a last resort.” In general, it seems to me that the use of violence and force has been our option of first resort (the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are good cases in point, as is the Drug War), and when the Defense Department can't even (or won't) tell how much of our budget it's spending or for what, we've got a serious problem. Police are issued automobiles instead of walking a beat, and are armed with guns and Tazers instead of nightsticks and nonviolent conflict resolution techniques. Violence is connected in our entertainment with sex and being macho. 10. 25 Million+, It is Time to Care About Rare Disease “There are close to 30 million people in the USA with rare diseases (a disease affecting fewer than 200,000 people).” These are worthy ideas. Change.org will be campaigning to enact these into the fabric of our self-governance by initiating national campaigns. They also plan to present them to Congress and the Obama Administration. If you value these ideas, step forward and be heard. | ||
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