Human Rights

 As people living on this Earth, we have basic needs to live. We need food to eat, clean water to drink, a safe place to live and sleep, and a community where we can build meaningful connections. I believe that each and every person on this planet deserves these things as basic rights. 

The fact that these aren’t a right has created a crisis in our community and across the country. This crisis affects men, women, and children. It forces people to go to sleep hungry. Many are left with no option, but to sleep in cars, bushes, and under bridges. It keeps all of us feeling more and more disconnected from the people around us and it only gets worse. For too long propagandists the rich and powerful have done everything they can to convince us that the problems in our society are caused by poor people who have no food to eat, no place to sleep, and no way to live a good and reasonable life.

I don’t have the words to describe how angry it makes me when I hear that entire families in our community are forced to live in unfinished garages, cars, and on the street. Not because they don’t work, but because housing costs so much. I don’t have the words to tell you how furious I am to hear that children go to bed hungry because their parents have to decide between paying rent and putting food on the table. We live in the richest state in the richest country in the world, this should not be a problem. It is despicable that individual people in the billionaire class are allowed to hold more money than entire countries while children starve. It is a crime against humanity that families sleep on the street or crowded into garages while the likes of Elon Musk are given handouts of millions of dollars a day by our government.

What our country needs is a set of basic food items free for everyone, that provides a healthy diet. What we deserve is free access to clean drinking water so no one is forced to buy bottled water because of water pipes leaking dangerous chemicals or because they don’t even have running water. What our country needs is a boom of well-maintained public housing that anyone can apply to live in. We must stop being divided by the propaganda of the rich and powerful that pit the working people of this nation against each other.

Healthcare is a human right, full stop. The vast majority of the world has proven that it is possible to provide healthcare for free to their citizens. Not only have they proven that it's possible, but it actually costs less per person and leads to greater health outcomes. In our country today people avoid going to the doctor when concerning symptoms arise because they are afraid of how much it will cost. Instead, they let the issue fester until they have no choice and something that could have been solved easily with no long term impacts becomes a threat to life and limb that costs so much more than preventative care. Some people may tell you things like “you’ll need to wait longer.” But is that really true? If you’ve ever put off getting treatment for a health-related issue until you couldn’t wait any longer, then I ask you this: Would you rather be able to go into any doctor’s office in the country and have to wait 2 weeks for treatment after scheduling an appointment? Or do you think it would be better to wait months or even years suffering to avoid paying, just to have to go when the problem has become unbearable and you need to pay even more?

Medical debt is a phrase that you won’t hear in other countries because it doesn’t exist. So why is it something that destroys so many lives in the richest country in the world? I believe in Medicare-for-All and total debt-forgiveness for anybody who holds medical debt. I believe that health insurance companies and pharmaceutical companies must be held accountable for the damage they have done to the health of our nation. Denying care, jacking up prices on procedures, treatments, and medicine, and using corrupt business practices to push highly addictive painkillers into our communities are crimes that deserve to be punished.

I believe that education is a fundamental human right that every single resident of the United States deserves to have no matter what. Our public school system has been allowed to slowly rot and we can’t let that state of things continue any longer. The primary issue that has led us to this place is the organization and funding of our schools. It has been designed and controlled by people who don't appreciate the importance of schooling and don’t believe that everyone deserves an equal education. For far too long low-income communities across our nation have suffered due to the funding sources and structure of our education system. All students across this nation deserve equal investment in their education. There shouldn’t be students in one school district who are learning from 20-year-old books while students in a neighboring district have access to the latest technology. This funding issue has also led to class sizes increasing exponentially, overburdening teachers, and causing students to lack the necessary time and attention that they deserve from their teachers. On top of that, so many of our teachers are living on poverty wages, paying off massive student debt, and paying for classroom supplies that should be provided by the school out of their own pockets. The lack of proper investment in our schools, students, and teachers has caused our nation to fall further and further behind others in educational outcomes. Underinvestment in our students, undervaluing of our teachers, and a reliance on old and ineffective teaching methods pushed from above has caused significant harm to our students and immediate reform is necessary. We should take inspiration from the methods that have been shown to be consistently effective at providing a quality education that values students' well-being. Schools deserve more funding, teachers deserve to be paid more, class sizes must be decreased in favor of hiring more teachers, and the methods we use to teach our students need to be reformed.

The importance of education doesn’t stop at high school either. I believe that nobody should have to go into life-altering debt to be able to continue their education and pursue the career they wish to have. All publicly run trade schools, colleges, and universities should be free to attend so the yoke of student debt can be removed from the people of our nation. The entirety of student debt held in this country should be forgiven because a nation of people whose income is all paid towards debt is not a free nation.

In many ways childcare is a defining issue of our time. For parents, the cost of childcare has become a serious burden, sometimes needing to pay more than rent to have somewhere safe for their children. For people who want to become parents, the cost of childcare is one factor that causes them to hold off from it. Our nation does not guarantee the parental leave that people deserve when their child is born. The ability for parents to take the time they need to care for and interact with their newborn is massively important for that child’s development. Forcing paretngs to choose between spending time with their baby and work causes stress for both parent and child. There should be a minimum of 6 months of guaranteed parental leave in addition to well funded, free childcare that follows best practices for child development. We have already recognized that it is possible to fund free public education in the K-12 system, this should be available to parents of infants and toddlers as well.

The category of "the arts" is broad and can refer to many things. They can be drawings or paintings, theater or music, architecture or culinary, but the one thing that binds them together is that they all make it possible to share our humanity with others. Creating and experiencing art helps people feel better, it helsp people empathize with others and share their thoughts and feelings, it can even be used for the simple purpose of entertainment. It is unfortunate that the arts have been pitted against the sciences by our society, treated like it can only be one or the other. There is no reason that needs to be the case, we can support the arts and sciences at the same time and with the same ferocity. An artless society has created a world where you go outside and everything looks the same, bland, boring, purely utilitarian. Our culture has been supplanted by consumerism and that is because the arts have been pushed to the side. There used to be places all around where you could go see a movie or a play, you could go out to listen to live music or go out dancing. Although those places do still exist, there are far fewer and this has had a harmful effect on all of us. Encouraging the arts is important, not only because of the direct benefits of having access to the art itself, but because practice and engagement with the arts encourages the creative thinking that we need to be able to make a better world.

Mass incarceration is a stain on this nation. The ability to lock people up and throw away the key is a tool that has been used to institute a new form of slavery, which goes unrecognized today. How can it be that China and India, both countries with populations that are almost five times larger than the US, have fewer people locked away? Because in the United States, far too many people have been pushed into our prisons and jails for minor infractions or even on false charges. What’s worse? The severe system of punitive justice that we have only increases criminality when people are finally able to get out. Why? Because in prison people are often not given any opportunities to better their chances of doing well once they have served their time. They are put into a position where they may need to join gangs to avoid being harassed. They are put into a position where they can’t save up any money for when they get out. When they are released they have no savings, they have fewer opportunities to be hired, and the people they’ve had the chance to get close with are more likely to be involved in organized crime. For many people, it can seem like the only choice they have to survive is to continue or go further into a life of crime. Other countries, like those in Scandinavia, have shown a different way that justice can be served, through rehabilitation. It’s clear that the way we do things in the United States today doesn’t work. People who get out of prison in the U.S. are more likely to recommit crimes than those in Scandinavia. That is because prisoners in Scandinavia are given the chance to improve themselves, to learn skills, get treatment for mental health issues or addiction, and in the U.S. that is almost never the case. Up until recently prisoners who put their lives on the line to keep us safe during wildfires couldn’t even become firefighters when they got out of prison. Although improvements have been made in the opportunities that exist for them, similar changes need to be made throughout to ensure that we can have a safe country. The harsh laws that put people away over minor, nonviolent crimes, must be updated to be more fitting of the crimes they are punishing.