Building community and positive vision

I could write for days about the horrors happening as the U.S. careens towards a dictatorship, and those in power do little to stop it. Today, though, I’m going to focus on the need for a positive vision of what America (and the world) can be, the need to connect people, the need to build community, the need for people to see one another as humans.

Too often, Democrats are talking only about the bad things the Trump Administration is doing. There’s plenty to talk about there, and it needs to be discussed. However, people also need to know what you are FOR. What would you do, not just what would you stop? This is a trap not only Democrats fall into and not only left-wing parties either. However, as the challenger or opposition party, which is what Democrats are in the U.S. at the moment, it’s easier to fall into only focusing on what you don’t want. I think one of the reasons Zohran Mamdani’s campaign for NYC Mayor (as well as Brad Lander, who was a close runner-up in the primary) has caught fire with people is he genuinely seems to love NYC. He has enthusiasm and passion to make the city better, not from a “it’s terrible and we have to change everything” lens but from a “it could be EVEN better” perspective. People may like tearing down their opponents, but genuine happiness and excitement can also sell. Maybe people are even growing tired of Trump’s perpetual griping. One can say many things about Trump, but have you ever seen him laugh at a joke or even seem to genuinely smile?

What about a vision in which:

• We build more housing, reduce zoning restrictions and speed up permitting. The cost of housing is a crisis across the U.S. (and much of the world).

• We stop demonizing immigrants as the cause of economic problems. Immigrants actually contribute positively to the economy. The world in which high-paid union factory jobs were plentiful and a family could live on one of these salaries is gone; additionally, plenty of white-collar jobs are in danger with AI taking over many functions or large chunks of them. We need to constantly offer reskilling and upskilling and training for people of all ages to transition to new jobs or sectors.

• We support funding of child care and pre-K schooling across the nation. This will enable more parents of young children to continue working/work full-time if they choose to do so, and will also ensure lower-income kids - whose parents aren’t paying for extra early educational programs - don’t fall so far behind wealthier peers before starting grade school.

• We make health care more affordable. It costs less and is more accessible in every other highly developed country in the world, most of which have longer life expectancies than the U.S. It can be done.

• We make the U.S. safer - particularly from guns, drugs, alcohol and car crashes. More early deaths related to guns, drugs and alcohol contributes 1.6 years of the lower life expectancy as compared to other advanced economies. Deaths related to car accidents are particularly high in the U.S. for pedestrians; in this category, notably, they increased 50% from 2013-2022 in the U.S. while they declined by a quarter in other advanced economies. More and better public transportation, changes to signage, regulations on height and vision path of certain vehicles, zoning changes, can all save lives here.

• We should ban all those in higher elected or appointed office - including President, Vice-President, Cabinet, Senate, House of Representatives, Supreme Court and some other key positions - from trading stock and should focus on rooting out corruption.

  This is by no means comprehensive and is just a sampling of some positive vision that can appeal to people.

  

  My family gathered for a St. Patrick’s Day celebration

Secondly, we are growing ever more disconnected from people. This of course does not apply to every single person. Nevertheless, there are myriad reports out there about the lack of human connectedness. A great piece by Allison J Pugh just came out talking about the dehumanization of people. She posits that it’s not exactly loneliness that is the problem, but the feeling of being invisible. Increasingly jobs treat people as interchangeable, and the rise of the gig economy only exacerbates this. Are you ordering via DoorDash or GrubHub or UberEats and barely acknowledging the person who delivers your food? Are you even noticing there’s a security guard or receptionist at the entrance to your office building, let alone talking with them? Maybe you are the person delivering the food or the security guard or receptionist. Or maybe you’re both ends of this at different times. We could all do more to address disconnection and lack of humanity.

Separately, a Washington Post column by Diana Lind discusses that Americans are spending more and more time at home, not at home socializing with friends over, but increasingly home and sedentary and solitary. Of course some time alone is good, and different people thrive in different amounts of alone time. But Americans are spending an average of 99 minutes more at home now than in 2003, and 15-to-24-year-olds are spending 124 minutes more at home than their counterparts did in 2003. Some of that has to do with things being expensive and some to do with homes often being far apart, so a teen/young adult may not easily be able to gather with friends given the lack of good public transport in most of the U.S. Lind also notes that only 54 percent of Americans have a “third place” other than home or work that they frequent, down from 67% just six years ago, and this number is declining.

If we only know people via screens on social media, we aren’t connecting and it’s easier to dehumanize.

Part of this vision for a better America and better world has to include helping people make friends and build connections. Community groups, parks, after-school activities, even playing video games with friends in-person, sports, walking clubs, and on and on.