Well, 2020 is done, 2021 is underway, and let's try to end this pandemic, get our economy going, restore law and order, bring back family, educate our children, once more embrace our highest principles, value both individualism and community, and love and serve each other. It won't be easy, least of all if we assume the American past has been a trash heap or that liberty-shriveling, misconceived policies are the answer.
It's true, of course, that, as 2020 closed out, the electorally dismissed President Donald Trump found a monster costume, put it on and growled. Even so, his shenanigans were no match for what we have seen from know-it-all bureaucrats and intellectually awry officeholders opposed to him. We need some resolutions of, by and for the people if we are to rise beyond one of the worst years in our country's history.
No list could be complete, but let's start with the most protective programs reasonably possible for those most vulnerable to COVID-19, even as we give businesses a chance, end unjustifiable lockdowns and avoid a depression worse than the one in the 1930s we call "Great." Unless we first destroy the economy for years to come, the supposedly impossible vaccine, which right now seems ridiculously controversial in some circles, can save us, although reestablishing as robust a system as we previously had will take time.
Let's open our schools. We've known it's safe for quite a period now, and we've also known that Zoom-education is next to no education and that we are wrecking young lives by the millions. Teacher unions have a lot to do with this, and it's time to get rid of them. As President Franklin D. Roosevelt pointed out, we don't want a small, self-interested group using collective bargaining to replace constitutionally devised government by the people. The unions have been no boon, either, in a system that's failing to teach young people to read proficiently, one of the most important objectives in making good lives possible.
The most-needed police reform is to get rid of police unions that have too often made it possible for malfunctioning cops to get away with their misdeeds. What isn't needed is "defunding" of a kind that lessens the number of police on the beat. If you think Black people are cheering, note that more than 80% want to keep police in their neighborhoods.
Anti-racism protests have in some cases turned into riots, and that's hardly the best way to attack racial disparities. A beneficial way would be to end the demolition of family, given the fact that children raised in fatherless homes are more likely than those with a dad on hand to drop out of school, commit crimes, commit suicide and stay poor. This is a cultural, not a political, issue, and it also affects white Americans, as in the 150,000-plus members of the middle-aged white working class who kill themselves each year with drugs, alcohol or self-slaughter.
We need a family matters movement for the preservation of our society.
When Trump was looking for a monster costume, he probably had a hard time finding one. What bureaucrats and not a few congressional Democrats have done the past four years has been to commit just about every illicit trick in the book to get rid of a duly-elected president. We need a Congress that respects the rule of law, won't pack the Supreme Court, among other contemplated outrages, and news outlets that stop putting bias before facts. Remember The New York Times doing a history project on America as a slave state, saying that the Revolutionary War was fought to preserve slavery when there is absolutely no evidence of any such thing, according to a top historian on the subject? The content is scheduled to be taught in public schools.
This can be a happy new year only if we resolve as much.
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