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Dear John,
The beginning of a new year represents an important passage, particularly significant in a year like this one. 2023 was not easy, and 2024 will most certainly be dramatic. Dramatic and decisive, as well, for Americans will decide on nothing less significant than whether we want to continue the American experiment.
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Too few Americans feel a visceral connection to that experiment, even to what it means or how it relates to them. In an age of rampant anxiety — people riddled with medical and college loan debt, anxious about the state of the planet, horrified by wars around the world — there is a dearth of hope among too many Americans today. For them, the American dream seems elusive at best. How hopeful can a student feel when they’re living out of their car while attending college, simultaneously accumulating college loan debt in the hopes of bettering themselves? How can we bemoan a “mental health crisis” while we’re tolerating policies almost guaranteed to plunge a person into anxiety and despair? The answer can’t just be more therapy or treatment for that student; maybe a place to live would be nice.
There was a lot more hope in the air when I was growing up. I was raised in a good home, with decent public schools and public libraries and parks. America didn’t feel like a dangerous place when I was young. Looking back now, I see how we took things for granted that cannot be taken for granted today. I grew up thinking I would have opportunity in my life if I worked for it, and I was right.
For too many Americans today, however, that is simply not true. There are millions of Americans not only working hard, but having to work hard at two or three jobs just to survive. We have the highest rate of poverty of any advanced democracy. Millions can’t afford enough food for their kids. Half of our seniors live on less than $25,000 a year! We cannot continue running our country as though such people simply do not exist. I am running for President because I’m clear that they do.
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During the 1980’s I was just beginning my career as a metaphysical lecturer when the AIDS crisis burst onto the scene. My work became entwined with a community of sufferers who showed me what strength and endurance and love can look like. Over the last forty years, I have been privileged to be up close and personal with many people at their times of greatest pain and sorrow. I have known many people who were struggling to bear the unbearable.
But during the early years of my career, while I knew many people going through hard times — the diagnosis of a life-challenging illness, the loss of a loved one — such times of crisis seemed like the exception and not the rule. Then something began to change around twenty years later, when I started to encounter far too many people for whom crisis was the rule and not the exception. The continuous crises of poverty, or no health care, or addiction, or depression. The rolling emergency of a life in which every day is a struggle to procure the bare necessities. These were not just individual cases of people going through a rough period. It began to feel like the tenor of our times, that some of us made it into the land of prosperity but far, far too many were structurally left out.
It took me a while to realize how fundamentally America had changed. In the 1970’s the average worker could afford a house, a car, and a yearly vacation; one parent’s salary could support a family of four; a couple could afford to send their kids to college. All those things meant a thriving middle class — and all of that has collapsed now. Over the last fifty years there has been a $50 Trillion transfer of wealth from the bottom 90 per cent to the top 1 per cent of Americans. Trickle down economics, a soulless economic theory if there ever was one, emerged with the effect of an economic coup. Stockholder values soared while other stakeholders paid the price — from people denied health care and low cost education, to even the dignity of being able to survive on just one job. It has led to the majority of Americans living paycheck to paycheck. It has led to gains for the very, very rich, and chronic struggle for the majority of Americans. And let’s not forget the $6 Trillion twin debacles of Iraq and Afghanistan! Yet the corporations behind all those things continue to leech on American citizens with impunity.
This has simply got to stop.
This year, may it be so.
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On to victory,
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