Ever get the feeling that your life is being decided for you by old white guys that are probably going to be dead by the time the shit hits the fan?
Must be nice to know that you won’t be baked by the fallout of the nuclear war you set in motion with your lack of diplomacy. Probably doesn’t cause any sleep-loss when you decide that the environment will take care of itself after you remove all the restrictions keeping all the profit-driven short-term thinkers from raping every natural resource they can from the land.
You’re rich. You’re old. Your kids can pick up the crap after you. If they have to duck and roll along the way, tough cheddar — you had to fight for … um, yeah … you had to fight for … oh, yeah, well, not much. But money. But old and white. And who really cares? You won’t have to meet any of these people and you won’t have to meet any of the genetic deformities they birth into the wasteland.
I think you should have to live with the ramifications of your decisions, so we should lower the age of Presidents so that they have to think a little bit harder about the changes they force on others. They should live in the world they create problems for.
There should actually be an extra year added onto the term called post-Presidency, where they have to live amongst the people whose lives they have shaped, and do volunteer service to help them. This should be in an area that was least served by the current administration. If you let gun violence escalate while you pocketed the NRA kickbacks you should have to work with victims of gun violence.
Strip back the funding for the EPA or contribute to industrial pollution? You should be on a clean-up squad.
Do nothing to stem domestic violence or address discrimination in the workplace? You should work at a women’s centre, or counsel people suffering from work related stress.
In short you should be left with an indelible sense of what you are doing to the world. If the presidential term were bookended with something like this then the presidency might be something you were a little bit more respectful of; that you might invest a little more time in making sure it went right, and that you helped the maximum number of people.
Champion race hate groups? Good luck working in that impoverished ethnically diverse inner city.
But yeah — no more shaping a world and checking out before you have to feel the effects of the blowback. Start younger and live through the aftermath — that should be the rule.
