#commoncents

Two hundred and forty years ago, Thomas Paine published a manuscript detailing the injustices perpetuated by the English on the citizens of the colonies of America. It, for the first time, called for something that we in the 21st century seem to take for granted; freedom.  During its time, Common Sense was more widely read than the Bible, and it wasn’t in the libraries of the ultra-rich or at the dinner parties of the famous, it was in bars and pubs all across the thirteen colonies for anyone; for everyone.

The society that has come as a result of these revolutionary ideals is not, nor has ever been, for everyone. Now the injustices are perpetuated by our own government. Our land was stolen from natives, our society was built on the back of slave labor and when slavery was abolished, companies found ways to keep people in an economic slavery; a system that continues even today.  Jim Crow laws kept black Americans living in fierce oppression for more than a hundred years, yet instead of embracing our past and attempting to understand, learn and heal from it, we ignore, perpetuate and allow it through our complacency and willful ignorance all drenched in a distracting coating of Kardashian. 

Today, one in five children in the United States of America is born into poverty. Now think about that.  One in five infants taking their first breaths in the world are already being judged by the situations of their parents.   I did not choose where I was born. I did not look through a catalog and pick my mother and father and decided that my two older sisters would be nice enough to me that I should choose the Williamson’s of Meriden, New Hampshire as the clan for me, and no matter your situation in life is, the hard truth is, neither did you. Yet we as a society blame people for being poor.

Today, the new Jim Crow laws jail black Americans at absurdly high rates, stripping them of their rights, dignity and humanity. Our recidivism rates are closer to 100% than 50%, much less 0%, and often times a return trip to jail is ordered simply as a punishment for not paying a fine. We not only blame the poor, but we jail them for being so.

Today, one in eleven (yes, that’s 1 in 11) Americans have diabetes. The food we eat is very literally killing us.  The amount sugar that we consume is well above what any health organization recommends as healthy, yet because corporations have the money to lobby government, the nutrition information, which details the daily percentage of things like calories or fat content, conveniently leaves the sugar percentage blank.  While it would surely be interesting to see that one can of coke would be over 100% of the recommended daily sugar intake, I am not sure how good it would be for the bottom line of the Coca-Cola or Pepsi corporations. It is a problem almost beyond comprehension when the American Government is more concerned about protecting corporate profits instead of protecting human health. If terrorists spiked our kid’s foods and drinks with sugar to give them diabetes and heart and liver diseases, we would send the full might of the American military (and the 60% of our tax money it costs to fund it) to utterly destroy them. When multi-national corporations do this, the government provides the necessary shade to hoodwink and perpetuate disease on the American people.

Today, over half of all public school students are living in poverty. While unions are being systematically dismantled under the guise of “right to work”, teachers, arguably the most important job on the planet, are presented with increasingly more difficult environments, cut budgets, and questionable mandates. Students are being diagnosed with ADHD at rates that are simply astounding, and interestingly enough (noticing a trend yet), lower income students are diagnosed over three times more than their higher income peers. Despite this fact, not one bit of thought is given to the foods served at lunchrooms across America. Compounding that issue, many of these low-income students live in what has now been coined a “food desert”; an area that only has corner stores and markets with sugary processed foods and not one piece of produce. Fun Fact: sugar causes hyperactivity. Instead we drug them. We consume so many drugs in fact that we in the United States consume nearly three quarters of the worlds prescription medication, and an alarming 80% of the worlds pain medication.  Are we really more predisposed to being hyper and having pain than the rest of the world? That really would be some American exceptionalism.

We are all one human species, endowed with the unbelievable ability to think, create, invent, love and add to the incredible wealth of knowledge that we have amassed as a collective human race, yet we are basically telling many American’s that they have nothing to add. They are not worth the expense for their education. They are not worth due process or a just criminal justice system. They are not worth feeding healthy foods. They are not even worth spending the necessary money so that their drinking water, the very essence of life itself, isn’t poison.

This is America in 2016.

We are now, once again, at a crossroads in the History of our nation. Our media fails us. Our Government fails us. Our economy fails us, but worst of all, we fail each other.  We are suspicious of each other, we look for differences and deny any commonalities.  We are told that this group or that group is to blame, but I propose to you, that is not any group, but it is our society as a whole that values money above all else that is perpetuating this cycle of inhumanity. We can be different. We must evolve. Sorry Gordon Gecko, Greed is not good.

There are those that may read this and think I hate America. That if I don’t like it, I should move. To those people I say this: I love America because our people, ALL our people, are the greatest in the world. We are the world. We have come from everywhere except this land that we have now inherited through blood and iron and the systematic genocide of a race of original people from whom we should be learning.

CommonCents is another fine #startup for students

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