New Hope for the Young Read online

New Hope for the Young

 

  Revised

  By Lawrence John Brown

  Copyright August 2014, September 2014, and May and July, 2016 by Lawrence John Brown

  This book is dedicated to the young people in America, who are paying for the sins of their fathers. This book, published on the 69th anniversary of the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, is also dedicated to the people who lived in those cities when the bombs were dropped. Let’s hope they will be the last people to know the horrors of nuclear war.

  The credit for the cover photo goes to NASA. The photo was taken by the crew of the Apollo 17 spacecraft on December 7, 1972.

  Part One

  New Hope for the Young

  I am the self-appointed representative of the New Hope wing of the Democratic Party. You may call me a nut, a dreamer, or a socialist, but I can offer the young people in America—to me that means anyone under fifty—new hope.

  My parents’ generation, who lived through the Great Depression and World War II, wanted their children to have better lives than they had. And I think my generation, the Baby Boomers, do have better lives: We are healthier, live longer, have nicer homes, and have more money to spend on travel and entertainment. And some of us can retire at an earlier age than our parents.

  Partly because of our good fortune, many of our children and grandchildren cannot look forward to better lives than we enjoy. In fact, many of the young people in America today face a bleak future due to the loss of good jobs to globalization, to overwhelming personal and public debt, to unaffordable rents and housing prices, and to a Social Security system that may not be able to pay them full benefits when they retire.

  In addition, the young people in America today will have to deal with the consequences of a crowded, rapidly warming planet; with the greatest inequality of income since 1929; with a Congress that appears to have sold its soul to Wall Street, defense contractors, and the Israel lobby; with terrorism, wars, and threats of war; and with oppressive federal, state, and local governments.

  Before I present a plan that can give the young people in America new hope, I want to talk about the purpose or role of government.

  The Declaration of Independence says that “all men are created equal” and receive from God rights, including the rights of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” It then says that men create governments to protect their rights. The Preamble to the Constitution says that one of the purposes of the Constitution is to “promote the general Welfare.” The Constitution itself mentions some of our other rights, including freedom of religion, speech, and press; the right to be safe from unreasonable searches and cruel punishments; and the right to vote.

  To me, the purpose of government could be expressed in just one word: “protection.” Governments should be serving us by protecting our rights, which today include the rights to a good job, medical care, and a college education.

  Our federal, state, and local governments have lost sight of their purpose. Today, we have the NSA and other federal agencies spying on everyone with a computer or a cell phone. We have heavy-handed SWAT teams breaking down doors and terrorizing people while police are shooting, handcuffing, strip searching, beating, and torturing people. We have hundreds of thousands of good citizens in prison as a result of the war on drugs.

  We have a federal government that gives special treatment to big corporations, such as in the decisions during and after the financial crisis of 2008 that some banks were “too big to fail” but not “too big to exist,” and not too big to pay out millions of dollars in bonuses to their executives while taxpayers bailed them out. We also have a federal government that allows some corporations to pay no taxes at all while allowing some wealthy individuals to pay taxes at a lower rate than the middle class.

  And we have state governments adopting Christianity as their official religion by telling us who we can marry, when and how we can die, and by trying to tell women what they can and cannot do with their own bodies.

  I understand that my view of our rights cannot be found in a literal interpretation of the words in the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution. But back when those documents were written, if you needed a job, you could become a farmer—there was free land available on the American frontier. And back then, medical care was affordable and people could get by with a basic education or even none at all.

  But we must recognize that we live in a different world from the world of our Founding Fathers. For one thing, there is no more free land and many young people have trouble finding jobs that can support a family. In addition, medical care has become much more advanced, and, therefore, much more expensive. And for most young people, a college degree is a must if they are to have a chance at getting a good job.

  Now after this introduction, I want to present the seven planks of the New Hope platform:

  1. It is time that we elect leaders who understand that the main purpose of government is protecting individual rights, which today include the rights to a good job, health care, and a college education.

  Our individual rights also include the rights to privacy and to live in safety, dignity, and freedom. This means government agencies should stop spying on us. It means police and the FBI should stop using sting operations and entrapment to encourage people to commit crimes. It means police at all levels of government should stop acting as if we lose our human rights when we are in their presence. And it means most SWAT teams should be disbanded and police forces should retire those members who act aggressively or abuse their power.

  Another important right is the right to the pursuit of happiness. The right to the pursuit of happiness means that responsible, mature adults should be allowed to do whatever they choose with their own lives as long as their actions don’t hurt others or threaten their safety.

  2. We need to reform our electoral process. Today it is based on the winner-takes-all principle, which is by its very nature undemocratic. We can make our electoral process more democratic by eliminating congressional districts and choosing House seats through a nationwide vote. Seats can be assigned to political parties based on their percentage of the total votes cast. (This is called a party list proportional representation system.) This reform will allow people of many different political beliefs to have a voice in government and will also have the advantage of ending gerrymandering.

  We can make the elections of presidents more democratic by simply eliminating the Electoral College and choosing presidents by nationwide popular vote using the instant runoff method. While we are reforming the elections of presidents, we should also limit presidents to one five year term. We should do this because it is very hard to deny a president a second four year term, even a bad president, because of the power and prestige of the office and the ability of presidents to shape events. Another reason why we should limit presidents to one five year term is because power corrupts everyone, and the longer the person in power, the greater the corruption.

  Perhaps the individual right most important in a republic is the right of every citizen to vote. This right can be made tamper-proof by a Constitutional amendment that requires the automatic and permanent voter registration of all citizens on their eighteenth birthday.

  We should also do things to make it easier to vote, such as allowing anyone for any reason to use an absentee ballot. We should allow people to vote by phone and we should make Election Day a national holiday or put it on a weekend. And after making it easier for people to vote, we should go one step further and require everyone to vote as part of their civic duty.

  3. We need to end the corrupting influence of money in politics. This can be done by the public financing of political campaigns and
by putting strict limits on political contributions from any source, including individuals, corporations, PACS, and special interest groups.

  4. We, the members of the New Hope wing of the Democratic Party, recognize that peaceful relations with other nations are the best foreign policy. We also recognize that we will never be able to eliminate the threat of Islamic terrorism until we get out of the Middle East and Africa and end our support for Israel’s occupation of Palestine. George Washington’s advice in his Farewell Address is still good advice today: We should avoid foreign entanglements and use the distance between America and the rest of the world to keep ourselves out of foreign wars.

  5. We should work to protect the environment with the urgency, energy, and focus that we put into war. This will require the construction and installation of solar and wind power generators on a vast scale and it will require that we phase out our nuclear power plants. It will require that we work to end population growth in the world through the education of women and girls and by making birth control available to everyone. Protecting the environment also means that we accept that nature has rights and that we stop abusing and torturing the animals we eat.

  6. We need to repair and rebuild our infrastructure and we can do this while providing good jobs for millions of people.

  7. We recognize that the rich have been given unfair advantages and that they should start paying society back for their blessings. As Jesus says in Luke 12:48: “For everyone to whom much is given, from him much will be required.”We need to return to the enlightened tax policies of the past, when income tax rates for the rich were as high as 90% and inheritance tax rates were as high as 77%.

  The rationale for higher tax rates for the rich is quite simple: Without the infrastructure and the political and economic climate that society has created, the rich in America would not have gotten wealthy.

  The first American Revolution was about ending the tyranny of England so that we as a nation could rule ourselves. The second American Revolution should be about ending the tyranny of our federal, state, and local governments so that we as individuals can lead fulfilling lives in privacy, safety, dignity, and freedom.

  Many of the people in the world today still look to the United States for inspiration and guidance. It is not too late for us to assume our destined role as a model to the world. We can lead the world to a new age by being a considerate, generous, humble, and peaceful nation in which the rights of nature and of all men and women are respected. We cannot lead the world to a new age by being a selfish, greedy, arrogant, and violent nation that is run by and for the rich.

  If we are to overcome the environmental, economic, political, and social crises of our time, we must understand, as I did when I wrote my first book My Country Is Called Earth, that we are all citizens of the Earth and all men and women are our countrymen.

  John Lennon said, “All you need is love.” We must find that love that is already in our hearts and set it free. I am optimistic that we will succeed and will not suffer the fate of the dinosaurs. In the words of John Lennon again, “You may say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one. I hope someday you’ll join us and the world will live as one.”

  Part Two

  The Big Lie

  The Big Lie says that Islamic terrorism against the West is the result of Muslim hatred of Western values and Western success and that there is nothing we can do about it except to crush it ruthlessly. The Big Lie ignores our history in the Middle East, where I think the roots of Islamic terrorism against the West can be found.

  Look at what we have done to Muslims just since 1990:

  In the 1990-1991Gulf War, we bombed the city of Baghdad, killing civilians, and we massacred Iraqi soldiers. After the war we imposed economic sanctions on Iraq that led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of children.

  Beginning in October 2001, we fought a brutal war in Afghanistan, killing thousands, including many civilians. And beginning in January 2002, we tortured Muslims in our prison at Guantanamo, Cuba, denied doing so, and today continue to torture Muslims by force-feeding them.

  Beginning in March 2003, we fought the brutal Iraq War. Estimates of deaths as a result of the war reach as high as a million people. In late 2003 and early 2004 we humiliated and tortured men in the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq for the fun of it.

  Today, using drones, we terrorize Muslim villages and kill civilians.

  Perhaps worst of all, we continue to support Israel militarily, financially, and diplomatically while Israel pursues the same old policies of occupying Palestine, building settlements on Palestinian land, depriving the Palestinian people of their human rights, and killing Palestinian civilians in the name of self-defense when they fight back.

  I think it is obvious that most Islamic terrorism against the West is payback, chickens coming home to roost. But we as a nation have refused to consider this possibility ever since 9/11. We have chosen instead to accept the neocon narrative—that we are engaged in a life or death struggle with people who hate Western civilization. It is time that we wake up and see the world as it really is, not as we wish it to be.

  Telling the Truth

  I want to tell the world the truth about a few other things:

  1. Jesus Christ: There is no evidence that Jesus actually did all the things the New Testament says he did. The New Testament itself is unreliable because it was written many years after Jesus lived and because it has been edited many times.

  But there is quite clear evidence that the life of Jesus as told in the New Testament is similar to the lives of gods in Near Eastern and Mediterranean religions that predated the life of Jesus. And in many of those religions there are deaths and resurrections of a godman, just as in Christianity. So it is likely that Christianity borrowed parts of its mythology from other religions. If you want to read more about this, see The Jesus Mysteries by Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy.

  2. Heaven and hell: There is also no evidence that there is a hell of eternal punishment for non-Christians and a heaven of eternal reward only for good Christians.

  3. The U.S. and Israel: The people of the United States and Israel believe the lives of their citizens are precious while the lives of Muslims are cheap. Of course, this is contrary to basic American principles and to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted by the United Nations in 1948.

  4. The Earth: No one, no individual, no group, no business, no corporation, no nation, and no civilization can actually own the Earth. The idea of private ownership of the Earth is new and is not supported by what we see in nature or in human history: Animals do not hoard wealth or property. And billions of individuals have lived in tribal and communal societies who did not think the Earth was their property to do with as they pleased. Instead, they saw themselves as caretakers of the Earth and humble participants in the web of life.

  We should look at our civilization’s relationship with the Earth as we would think of travelers passing through Paris. Would these travelers have the right to tear down the Eiffel Tower and build a shopping center in its place? Of course not. Yet our civilization has existed for only a few thousand years out of the billions of years that the Earth has existed and we are causing irreversible damage to the Earth.

  5. Global warming, the environment, and population growth: Fighting global warming doesn’t have to be a drain on the economies of the world. Solar power has become much more affordable in the past few years. And we won’t be able to stop damaging the environment as long as the world’s population continues to grow.

  6. Good intent: Most people in the world are of good intent. This means that most people in the world think they are doing good things, even if they aren’t. It is from this pool of people that we can build a better world.

  Why I Believe in a Spiritual or Non-Physical Reality

  First of all, it just makes sense to me. Everything I do has purpose and meaning. Why would my life have purpose and meaning while the universe doesn’t?

  There are
several other good reasons to believe in a spiritual or non-physical reality:

  1. Science’s Big Bang theory opens the door to a spiritual or non-physical reality because, as logic and experience tell us, everything in the physical universe must have a cause. Since science cannot see beyond the beginning of the universe, the Big Bang, a quite reasonable answer to the question of where the physical universe came from is that it was created in a spiritual or non-physical reality.

  2. The theory of evolution is an irrational idea. The theory of evolution, which is based upon chance genetic mutations, is all you’ve got to believe in if you are an atheist. But if you are open to the idea of a spiritual or non-physical reality, as all seekers of truth should be, then I think it is much more sensible to believe that a force or intelligence of some kind outside of the physical universe was involved in the creation of life than to believe life in all its incredible beauty and complexity came about solely through accidents and lots of time. Besides, the theory of evolution cannot explain where the first life came from.

  3. Experiences of what is called ESP, such as telepathy, precognition, and clairvoyance, can best be explained by the existence of a spiritual or non-physical reality.

  We are constantly having ESP experiences in our dreams and daily lives, even if we aren’t aware of them. For example, telepathy is taking place all the time on a subconscious level. So when we know who is calling us just before we answer the phone, that is probably due to telepathy. And when someone says, “You have taken the words right out of my mouth,” that is probably due to telepathy too.