New year, but with the same old issues

Ari Kotler

What a year it’s been.

President Donald Trump’s rotting brain has continued its plunge into insanity.

White ethno-nationalists (big shoutout to Iowa Rep. Steve “Grand Wizard” King), “fiscal conservatives” and the super-rich remain in a happy political marriage and maintain  control of our government. Migrants, fleeing violence caused by the U.S. and its allies, are being hunted and trapped in cages by paramilitaries border security agents at the request of Trump.

Black people are still routinely surveilled, seized, sent to modern-day gulags and oftentimes  slaughtered by paramilitaries the police. The working-class continue to soldier on for terrible wages as corporations pound their employees into dust and Silicon Valley tech ghouls get rich by making cool apps. Finally, humanity nears its final days as death by climate change grows ever closer.    

While this is all admittedly depressing, there is no time to be depressed. We must come  together in the new year with hope, haste and a hearty bowl of political revolution. What better way to do so than with some radical New Year’s resolutions. Let us resolve to do the following:

Mass incarceration and our culture of extreme punishment has terrorized communities and destroyed millions of lives. Let’s radically reform our police departments, free hundreds of thousands of inmates from cruel and unjustified incarceration and end private prisons.

We must end the reckless bipartisan foreign policy consensus of perpetual war and mass killing. Let’s put an end to the U.S. war machine by vowing never again to unilaterally invade sovereign nations, dethrone democratically elected leaders and prop up brutal dictators.

There is no justification, in the richest country in the history of humankind, for any child to be born poor or any family to struggle to survive. Instead of spending our money on wars and corporate tax cuts, let’s provide free and universal health care and education, rebuild our national infrastructure and end hunger, poverty and homelessness.

Every worker, no matter where they work, how old they are or how much education they have, deserves a decent wage. Let’s create and defend a set of national unions, so that every single worker in the U.S. has the power to demand good and fair wages, workplace conditions and paid leave from their employer.

Climate change is the single biggest crisis that humanity has ever faced. Let’s urgently transform our energy system by transitioning away from fossil fuels and toward a  100 percent renewable energy economy.

Let us resolve to do all of these things and more.