Progressives want the control, the power, to be in the hands of the people, not governments, and certainly not corporations. And by people, we mean all adults with legal voting rights. We want our public leaders to be held accountable for the wrongs they knowingly commit, such as pretending that our national security is threatened when it is not. And we want corporations to be stopped from raping and pillaging planet Earth for the bottom line, profit. We want the idea of “profit” to be changed from money to creating a sustainable world, one in which all God’s creatures exist harmoniously with a strong sense of fairness and equality.

We don’t want people to be marginalized based upon religion, sexual orientation, race, creed, nationality, etc.

We are sick of seeing governments lick the collective corporation arse. And we are sick of seeing corporations destroy the environment, including people and animals.

We want progression toward a world in which all people are equal, given a fair shot at life. And that other living creatures have their place too, not for us to brutally grind up to the point of extinction.

We don’t want a world in which the 1 percent can be hogs at the trough while the rest of us have to stand back waiting to clean up their manure, breathing their foul-smelling gas.

These are just plain common sense, the best way to live. Not a dangerous proposition in the lot. Nothing that forbids love of country, for example. Or for that matter, love of any country. If we all followed these rules, we’d get along just fine. War would be dead. We would still need soldiers because some people are born soldiers, but now soldiery could include service in the Navy, Army, or Air Force Space Corps. They would need brains and they would need pilots.

Replace the antagonism of adrenaline-fueled combat with the adrenaline and dangers of exploration.

“Money” means privilege, even though “money” is an abstraction. That’s why the love of money is the root of all evil, because money is an abstraction. Because if you worship money, you worship an abstraction. It doesn’t exist. The aftairs of civilization will fail if we can’t find a better way of establishing merit. Seriously, a species whose members cannot agree on what is healthy for the species would not seem to have much chance of long-term survival.

And planet Earth is doomed if we continue to exploit her for the profit of the 1 percent.

MARIANNE BEASLEY

Fayetteville