Message to The Future III

 

For almost fifty years our ruling class knew about the dangers and effects of global warming. They did the research, hired the scientists, and even came up with evidence proving climate change was a real threat to humanity. Instead of doing something heroic with this information like you’d expect our corporate overlords to do, they chose greed. Instead of taking the path to save lives and reduce suffering, they chose the path of profits, no matter how short term those profits may have been. Companies like Exxon and the lobbyists and politicians that helped them should all have a guilty conscience. That dinosaur of a company and those who helped them should have suffered the consequences of their actions but they never did. The uber rich seldom face the consequences of their actions; the rest of us are left to suffer for them. They knew the game they were playing and they knew who the losers would be in the end so they didn’t care how fairly the game was played. How many lives have been lost due to their negligence? How much of our planet's diversity has been erased thanks to large businesses like Exxon? We never learned the answers to these questions and we likely never will thanks to our government’s unwillingness to do anything negative to the rich.

The plutocracy that existed during the reign of the CEO’s made it difficult to get anything done. With all the money in the world, the rich had every tool at their disposal to do whatever they wanted in our government. For the longest time it seemed those of us who actually cared to make a change couldn’t. Even those democrats who were supposed to be on the right side of history had trouble aligning themselves with progressive policies. For a time it even seemed they would rather work with republicans than label themselves as progressives. Our rich had such a strong hold on our government that they had made their way into both parties, influencing every policy decision coming out of Washington. This is why someone like Donald Trump was elected into office. Regretfully it took someone like Trump and a global pandemic for the world to wake up and see that the system we have in place can no longer function. It is sad that it always takes a horrible tragedy for us to make real change. Thanks to Trump’s negligence and the clear wealth gap illustrated by the pandemic, many Americans finally woke up to the issues facing our country. Things that were hardly talked about like Medicare
for all and the green new deal suddenly became mainstream. Of course this is mostly thanks to politicians like Bernie Sanders and AOC who paved the way for other progressives to take office and worked hard to spread their message. 

With the popularity of progressive policies on the rise more and more politicians began adopting policies aimed at serving the public rather than the 1%. The decades of brainwashing and lobbying done by corporations quickly came undone once it was made clear that big businesses care more about profits than people. This was made very evident during the pandemic  where large corporations and banks were given more than three trillion dollars in coronavirus relief while the rest of the country was left to suffer and wait while many of our politicians went on holidays and looked for more ways to benefit the rich. To say this was a turning point is an understatement. 

Because of the massive unemployment and crumbling economy, bills like The Green New Deal finally had a chance to shine. Inequality was more evident than ever before. Police killings of black people highlighted the inequities of our nation and made it clear that we have not even solved the problem of racism in our country after over fifty years. Protests were becoming more powerful and more frequent. Americans found their voice like never before and became impossible to ignore even with massive resistance from the sitting president, even going as far as to attempt using the military against US citizens. The republican party was in shambles after Trump and progressives quickly took their seats. Americans would no longer be robbed blind by the people meant to represent them. Though they tried their hardest to hoard their wealth and rights, the 1% were finally forced to share what had been given to them by the workers they underpaid and mistreated. 

Removing money from politics was one of the first things done by the progressive party following ranked voting which replaced the electoral college and popular vote. With a proper democracy in place progressives were finally able to pass all the popular bills they wanted without interference from lobbyists or other politicians who were once legally bribed to vote in favor of the extremely wealthy. With a new system in place meant to serve the people we could finally be the shining example we were always meant to be to the rest of the world.