With much of the world at a standstill, it’s really time to hit the reset button. Globally. Now is the time to fix the broken, stop the environmental destruction, oust the lobbyists whose orchestrated efforts have destroyed our lives on so many levels. Will it happen? Of course not. While people and the economy are fast dying, the special interests are alive and feverishly (no, not from the virus) planning their next attack.

Donald Trump and his minions are continuing to roll back environmental regulations, allowing the fossil fuel industry to continue to plunder and pollute with gleeful abandon and he’s rolling back automobile fuel standards put in place by the Obama administration in 2012. And those are just a few of the things he’s done in the past few months.

Trump was responsible for dismantling our country’s pandemic preparedness department (also put in place under Obama). In California, under its previous Governor Jerry Brown, the state’s massive stockpile of medical equipment and supplies was never maintained and was eventually decimated. The shortsightedness of these idiots in power is astonishing, which is precisely why America has never maintained its infrastructure.

A pandemic is ravaging us. Millions have no health insurance. Trump has refused to reopen the health insurance exchange under the Affordable Care Act so people can try to buy insurance during this time. Of course the Affordable Care Act was an Obama accomplishment and Trump has vowed to destroy everything Obama did, whether it worked or not, was good for the country or not, saved peoples lives or not. If ever there was a time for universal health care, it is now. Now … when millions need to be tested and countless others will need acute care in the ICU of hospitals that currently have unregulated billing systems and you could end up being charged many thousands of dollars that could cause you to go bankrupt.

So much is wrong with our social systems in this country, a country that prizes corporate interests over people. We have no safety nets or certainly inadequate ones. The proof is all around you. Nearly four million people have applied for unemployment insurance this past month. How much higher will that number go? What then?

Now is the time to hit the reset button. Cancel all debt for those earning under $100,000 a year. Maybe small business debt has to be higher, I don’t know. Let the economists figure that one out. Institute universal health care. Make education affordable. Give people a living wage. Income equality now. Tax fairness now. Get the homeless off the street. Give people who most need it a stimulus that actually means something. A one-time $1,200 payment isn’t going to cut it. Grow a backbone and the political will to do what needs to be done. Make people whole again. Make our environment whole again. Heal the planet before this pandemic increases in intensity much as our fires and floods have.

It’s great that states are saying landlords should stop evicting people for the time being. But how do you pay back rent/mortgage when you’ve earned nothing for weeks/months at a time? Hit the pause and reset. Do it now. But more important is to fix the things in our society that are broken. The list is miles long. Get rid of the special interest lobbyists in federal and state governments.

Shortsightedness is death. Now is the time. Hit the reset button. We know what to do. Hard work, yeah. Necessary work, definitely. But now is the time.

by: Ginger Marin