My wife created the icons above and I wrote the text below because we want a shorthand for our core ideals. These are symbols for what we believe. These symbols are designed to be easy to place on a sign at a rally or on a candidate’s web page or at the top of an e-mail.
While Trump is exposing the GOP for the hypocrites that they are, the Democrats are losing a valuable opportunity to stand up for what's right. It's not enough to focus on what the kleptocrats are doing wrong, it's not enough to point out that the popular vote loser is breaking every promise he made to regular people while keeping every secret promise he made to his billionaire paymasters and white nationalist twitter army.
We need to explain what we stand for, or those who feel betrayed by DT will sit the next one out. They just won't vote. That, combined with vote suppression, could give the GOP the state houses they need to change the Constitution. They would like:
- A balanced budget amendment to eliminate welfare and social security
- A flag burning amendment to purge Democratic voters who did not fall to the war on pot (see Report: Aide says Nixon's war on drugs targeted blacks, hippies)
- An anti-abortion amendment
- An amendment that treats protesters and journalists as terrorists
We would like the following amendments:
I believe that we all agree on a few things. When Trump was elected, it was these issues that made me feel ill. We believe that we all have rights to expect the following to be guaranteed by a first world government:
- clean water
- healthcare
- human rights
- science
Clean Water
The situation in Flint will someday be regarded as a national shame as terrible as segregation. Children are dying, or are suffering from lead poisoning before they reach their teenage years. Most of those harmed are not white. But the problem is not just in Flint, Michigan. It's likely a problem in most of the United States. Water departments in Philadelphia and Chicago -- and at least 31 other U.S. cities -- have been caught cheating on water tests (https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/jun/02/lead-water-testing-cheats-chicago-boston-philadelphia). The list of 33 cheating cities only covers cities east of the Mississippi.
Some of those cities are in blue states. Most have Democratic mayors. So if the party is going to stand for clean water, we cannot allow lead-laden water in Chicago or Boston or Philadelphia.
Healthcare
This is the issue that is bringing protesters to town hall meetings. Maybe older people feel this more sharply than younger people -- older people are more ill, and older people are more likely to have to pay for regular medication. This is an issue that is covered in depth on dailykos, especially in articles by Joan McCarter such as Cancer survivors' message to Republicans: 'We literally live and die by insurance'
I think that the Democratic Party is doing well here, but I'd like to see state governments preparing to replace Obamacare with Romneycare. Many blue states are adjacent to other blue states (sorry, Illinois) and I could see states building regional markets that have the right to negotiate better prices from PHRMA -- something that I believe the GOP has prevented Obamacare and Medicare from doing.
Human Rights
Do we really have to have this conversation again? I think that the Democratic party is doing less than it should in part because we're all shocked at how bigoted the news has been since the election. Everybody is at risk. Islamic people and African-Americans are at greatest risk, along with those deemed LGBTQ. Anti-semitic attacks and bomb threats abound. A man in Kansas shot some Indian engineers because he thought they were Arab terrorists (Man in Kansas bar shoots three men shouting 'Get out of my country.' Sound familiar? ).
SCIENCE
The Democratic Party has had numerous opportunities to defend science and has failed to do so. It's not just climate change. It's also about education policy, about pollution regulation, about standing up for basic research. It's about Obama's FDA (The FDA eases rules on abortion pill to reflect actual medical science, increase access). In many cases, we have to defend regulation and government in order to defend science. All too often, we fail to do defend both government and science.
Conclusion
These principles can be best implemented at the federal level, but they are also viable at the state level. For example, the New York City Human Rights Law provides protection for more people than any federal law (in legal jargon, it's described as recognizing more protected classes than federal law, which includes court decisions).
In order to fight the party of fear, we need to renew our message of hope. Hope is weak right now, as Michelle Obama noted. Let's make sure that hope does not die.
I've asked my wife to make four symbols, one for each of these beliefs. These symbols can be mixed and matched. Use whichever ones make sense to you. We hope that they will provide a shorthand for hope and progressive values.
