Preview
To get to a better and brighter future, we first need to understand ourselves. We can start to do that by looking at our past and looking at where we presently find ourselves. Once we understand ourselves, we can better decide where we want to be in the future. Then, to get to our desired future, we need to map out a path that will solve our current problems, will avoid new problems, and get us to our chosen future with the least amount of effort and in the shortest time.
In the sections of this chapter, I will preview some of what will come in the later chapters, including information about our problems, past, present and future, and my ideas and solutions.
There are many of us who are unhappy or even angry about where our nation and our world have been headed, and we want some changes made. Here in the United States, this became even more evident in the 2016 election, which led to the election of a new president who was a political outsider who promised some big changes. However, those promises came without any real forethought or plan. In fact, many of the promised changes could not be achieved with the proposed methods or were instead bad for our country and our environment. Although we want change, we need to make the right changes to create a better future for ourselves and all living things.
For me, the biggest loser in the 2016 election, the subsequent elections and beyond those elections has been the truth. There have been so many exaggerations, misstatements, half-truths, fake news stories and outright lies that I have found it hard to like any of the candidates. This is despite my trying to get the truth from more reliable sources and trying to form my own opinions of each of the candidates.
The problem is that it is not always easy to find out the truth and too many of us do not make a real effort to find out the truth. None of us should want representatives who are willing to lie and to cheat to get what they want, since they will ultimately end up doing things that could hurt all of us.
All the negative campaigning in these elections and all the continuing misinformation and lies has divided our nation even further than it was and has left many of us with a lot of mixed feelings about where we and our nation are headed. This divide could lead us in the coming years into a lot more turmoil and pain, or it could hopefully spur more of us to stand up and to work together towards creating a better future for all of us.
I have never really been happy about voting for any candidate, since it seems most of them are more interested in representing the interests of themselves, their campaign donors, or their political parties than in what is in the best interests of the constituents they were elected to represent. In addition, many, if not most, of the policies of all the existing political parties seem to be focused more on helping the members of their party and their donors than their constituents.
Furthermore, the emphasis of most of our representatives seems to be more on what is wanted by their own party leadership or some faction within the party than on what is wanted even by the party's other members. Of course, even listening to all the members of their party is not enough. We need representatives who are focused on policies that will help all of us and all living things. By not focusing on everyone, they are dividing us instead of bringing us together.
It is my hope that we can all come together to work towards creating a better future for ourselves and all living things, here and around the world. The way to do that is to elect representatives who will, above all else, "do no undue harm", "protect everything from undue harm", and "allow all living things to live their lives their way".
However, for us to elect better representatives, we all need to be knowledgeable and well informed, and to be involved in our political process. I provided some information that will help us to be more knowledgeable and better informed in the sections of the previous Foundation chapter, and I will talk more about this in the upcoming chapters.
The world we live in today still has many problems that we do not seem to be able to solve. These include, but are not limited to, poverty, hunger, crime, disease, drugs, discrimination, hate, war, terrorism, corruption, partisan politics, pollution, non-renewable energy, extinctions, and climate change. We have made some inroads into solving some problems, but often at the expense of making other problems worse. In addition, we are constantly creating new problems for ourselves and for all the living things on our planet.
Although many of us today live longer, healthier and better lives than our ancestors, many of our lives are not improving or are getting worse. In addition, the improved lifestyles that some of us enjoy have come at the expense of our environment and have caused the extinction of thousands of species of plants and animals.
Given the world's current expanding population, and our current lifestyles, our very existence is increasingly becoming dependent on our continuing improvements in crop yields, and our continuing advances in medicine and in many other areas. Therefore, any failure to reduce our population or to keep advancing would likely result in global famine and war, and even the collapse of human civilization entirely.
Up until now, we have mostly been able to keep advancing fast enough to keep improving our lives. However, there are some major impediments to our continuing advancement that we are rapidly approaching or have reached. These include limited available resources and the limits imposed by the laws of physics, chemistry and biology. In addition, our current political environment is preventing us from making the changes that we need to solve our problems.
Even though we have made and are making some progress in solving some of our problems, much more needs to be done, sooner rather than later. If we are not able to start making some significant changes very soon, we will run out of time, and everything could start to decline very rapidly.
Every day, we need to make decisions that will help to determine how good or how bad our lives will be today and in the future. We may make some decisions that will make our lives better today but will lead us into trouble in the future. We may make other decisions that will make our lives more difficult today but will make our future much brighter.
In some cases, our decisions will only affect our own future or our own family’s future. In other cases, our decisions will help determine the path that our society will take into the future. Our future path will help decide the eventual fate of our society, of our species and of our world.
We need to start making decisions today that can help us create a better future for all of us, for our environment, for our world, and for all the other living things with whom we share this world. Some of our decisions may make our lives a little more difficult in the short term but will make our lives much better in the long term.
To solve our problems, we must commit to doing something. To do something in the most efficient and constructive way possible, we will need a comprehensive plan. This plan will need to include the effort needed to identify what we want our future to look like and the problems we may face, to find the causes and solutions to these problems, and to find the best path we could take to get to our desired future.
We want to transform our world into one where we humans and all other living things would have a brighter and more sustainable future. Since everyone is different and would want something different for their future, there is no single image of what this future should look like. Instead, the future should be a place where all of us and all other living things will have the ability to live our and their lives as we and they want. To make this work, there are a few things that this future must include.
Every one of us who is willing and able to work should be able to get a job and a comfortable place to live. Our overall cost of living should be much lower, and we should have an overall higher standard of living, while at the same time better protecting our environment and all the living things with whom we share this world. We should also have more opportunities and more freedom to live our lives as we choose, while at the same time being better protected from crime and other dangers.
For a long time, especially since the late 1990s, I have been thinking about and analyzing the way in which our world works and identifying our various problems. My goals have been to become more knowledgeable and better informed, to find the real causes of our problems and to come up with actual workable solutions instead of the temporary patches that are so often proposed. Of course, sometimes temporary patches are needed until the real causes of a problem can be reliably identified and some permanent solutions can be found.
I believe that the solutions that I have come up with can work. They are not some quick temporary fixes like many individuals and groups have often promoted. However, these solutions will require a deliberate and comprehensive restructuring of some parts of our political system, economy and communities so that they will all be more sustainable, and will work more simply, efficiently, honestly, and equitably for everyone.
Taken together, I believe these solutions would make our world a much better place than anything we have had before and will work better for all of us and all living things. These solutions just need some final details, some more backers, and an agreement on the best possible plan to implement them.
The paths that we have taken in the past have brought us to the current state of the world, which has a multitude of problems, and is very unstable and unsustainable. Some of us are on a path that is making progress in making our lives better and more sustainable. However, too many of us are still on the wrong path. Unless many more of us change our path, it looks very unlikely that we will be able to solve our current problems, let alone solve all the new problems that we seem to be headed towards.
Therefore, we must all move towards a better path. What our future will end up being will depend on which path we take into the future. If we take the right path, our future could be much better and brighter than it has ever been. If we take the wrong path, our future, if we have one, may be very bleak.
Of course, we may all have different ideas about what we want our future to look like, but I believe that all of us want our futures to be better. Therefore, we should all want our society to follow a path that will help take us all towards a future that will allow each of our lives and the lives of all living things to be better. In fact, we can create a better future where we can all have the liberty and freedom to live our lives in a way that we feel is best for ourselves, while still allowing others to live their lives in a way that they feel is best for them.
Given the size and complexity of our society and of our world, it may be difficult for anyone to fully comprehend the impact that our individual paths will have on our society’s overall path. Therefore, we need a plan that will help guide our choices so that we can all follow the best path for ourselves and for our world.
To start with, our plans need to be based on a solid foundation of respect, justice and the right balance of freedoms and obligations for every person and for every living thing. This will give us our best chance for creating a better future, for ourselves, our descendants and all the other current and future inhabitants of our planet. Basing our decisions on this solid foundation will help guide us in making the needed political, economic, social and other changes that will lead us on the path towards a better future where we can all have a higher and more sustainable standard of living, while better protecting our environment.
With this solid foundation in mind, I have come up with many ideas that I have put together into a plan for making the world a better place for all. I am convinced that we can use these ideas and this plan to guide our future path, so we can make our way towards a much better and more sustainable future.
Within the pages of this book, I will try to describe some of these ideas. In doing so, I will also try to describe what some of our current problems are, why many of our current solutions are not working, and why my ideas can make our world a better place for every person and for every living thing.
It has been said that the devil is in the details. This is especially true when talking about complex things like our political, economic, immigration, health, and social issues. A good sounding solution or idea may not look so good after we start working out the details. The opposite may be true of a bad sounding solution or idea. Of course, there are some solutions and ideas that are just so bad, that no level of detail would make any difference.
The bottom line is that we need to work out the details of most of our solutions and ideas before we know for sure whether they are truly good or truly bad. I have tried to work out enough of the details for each of my solutions and ideas to be sure that they are good. However, I am not an expert in everything or even in most things, so I may have missed something. If so, please let me know via the email link below.
In the following sections, I will try to provide some information that will describe where we are in the present and where we can be in the future.
Present -
Preview of where we are in our present.
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