RESOLUTIONS FOR 2021

1. Addiction will cease to be considered a sin or a character flaw.
2. No longer will we discover hidden in the alleys and doorsteps of our US cities and scattered through the countryside of rural America a vast network of invisible, inarticulate, impoverished, citizens and illegal immigrants, living out lives of quiet desperation, one paycheck away from disaster.
3. No person will be turned away from a doctor or hospital care because of lack of insurance.
4. Attitudes toward the poor will no longer include the concepts that they deserve their lot owing to their being stupid, lazy, or criminal-the undeserving poor.
5. No person will be harassed by anyone or arrested by police because he or her is Black.
6. No police officer will be killed or injured during the routine exercise of doing their assigned duty.
7. People will one day listen to another person whose ideology differs. Hate of a person because his/her ideology differs will cease from the earth. Everyone will take the Parable of the Good
   Samaritan to heart.
8. The legal, religious, political, and ideological, systems of the world will no longer maintain bias against women and children who have been maltreated. That will include men as a group, as well.
9. The concept of “greed-is-good” and “winning-is-everything” will become a relic of the shameful past.
10. America will become the land of the free; equality will include everyone.
11. No law-abiding citizen will have reason any longer to fear police.
12. Police will have no fear of helping an old lady walk down the stairs of her apartment in the projects to pick up her social security check.
13. Black sites will be relegated to that same shameful past as a relic to be ignored and forgotten.
14. No child will be born into a family which is poverty-stricken family in a blighted neighborhood which exposes the child to malnutrition, trauma and abuse, teenage pregnancy, rape, STDs, homicide, eventual incarceration, truncated education, exposure to abysmal role models, and an enduring multi-generational cycle of poverty. Poor people living in such neighborhoods will no longer be exposed to environmental toxins such as air and water pollution, other people with communicable diseases, and a social milieu of crime and criminals; that will cease this year.
15. War will be called for, and no one will attend.
16. People will treat their neighbors as they would like to be treated… or not: people’s desires, attitudes, and beliefs, may differ.
17. Lung cancer (and tobacco), Ebola (and superstition and poverty), Covid 19 (and concepts of anti-vaxxing and “fake news”), and abortion (and beliefs that murder of babies is acceptable so long as it coincides with women’s rights) shall be eradicated because people will come to recognize the difference between right and wrong on a gut, scientific, religious, medical, and personal, level.
18. US will have three nearly co-equal political parties—one each for the extremes of right and left, and one for everyone else somewhere in the middle.
19. Term limitations for all elected governmental people will be recognized as good for the people, the government, and for America, by the 2021 elective bodies; and they will act on that new idea accordingly.
20. Color, racial, national origin, ideological, and socioeconomic status bias will cease, not just because it is wrong, but because people will learn in schools, churches, political rallies, and community meetings, that is for the practical good to do so.
21. And, finally, we will all wake up on the morning of January second and realize that the first twenty resolutions were mere fantasy and the product of a good dream.

HAPPY NEW YEAR: let’s try again.