Obviously, congratulations are in order, but as you rightly indicate, it is not for you alone, as much as for our nation that was willing to accept change by electing you as President, embracing the challenge of an uncertain future. That you have asked this nation to remember its founding creed that all men are created equal and that these freedoms and liberties, these ideals as you call them, will not be given up for expedience's sake– is our collective North Star.  May you always remember to navigate by them.

As this nation breathes a huge collective sigh of relief at this passing of the torch of leadership, this bloodless change of power, you have asked the people for their ideas. I am sure that you’ve heard from almost everyone but here are a few of mine.

It seems like America has been at war most of my entire life. I was born at the beginning of the Korean War, raised during the Cold War and came to manhood during the Vietnam War.  We have fought small wars, short wars, clandestine wars, drug wars even a War on Poverty. I’m not sure what the score is on winning versus losing, but almost every one of them has cost our country dearly in both blood and currency. Even these last two wars, which you now inherit as commander in Chief, have cost us a fortune in both–can we for once attempt to have the alternative to gunboat diplomacy– Peace?

Some of these wars like the ever-present War on Drugs have lasted for decades and have never accomplished the mission of diminishing drugs on our streets or the crimes perpetrated to maintain the black market that they support.  The ongoing conflict of this war can now been seen south of our borders in Mexico where some 4,000 citizens have been murdered just last year alone. The more we have fought this war, the more money is made by the cartels and entities that support and distribute the drugs, and the more legitimate governments have been corrupted by drug profits. We will not be immune to these corruptions unless and until we decriminalize, regulate and tax these drugs in much the same way FDR reversed the Prohibition of alcohol.

The other thing is that we as a nation have never been good at fighting more than one war at a time.  Lyndon Johnson failed at both the War on Poverty and in his pursuit of the War in Vietnam. Nixon failed with Vietnam because of his expansion into Cambodia and Laos and his paranoid attack on dissidents at home. Even unto your predecessor’s two front war in Iraq and Afghanistan, you have seen our inability to win in either theater because of a divided attention.  This of course doesn’t even address the problems caused when a president leads our nation into war unjustifiably. And please don’t assume that sending more soldiers into Afghanistan will succeed when history tells us that this is not necessarily true.

One of my pet peeves that has grown up along with these conflicts over the last few years is that every time a president anoints the leader of a new mission to fight some problem, he names them as a “czar” of this agency or that and I can’t think of a title that is less democratically symbolic.  First of all the term comes from an entirely different tradition than ours, Russian Imperialism, and connotes a kind of supreme authority that is above reproach and question.  This kind of title has nothing to do with the ideal of the democratic “rule of law,” as I believe it is duty of every citizen to question authority and to confront illegitimate uses of power.

Next on my suggestion list is that in light of the current crisis of capitalism and the veritable monetary freefall precipitated by the ideology of free market purists, obviously re-regulating banks, Wall Street brokerages, insurance companies and energy markets is mandatory.  The current budget crisis in California originated with the deregulation and the Enron gaming of our energy market in much the same way oil prices were speculated out of control in 2007-08. This has to stop! Further, if you are of a mind to bail out somebody, then the State of California should be on the top of your list.  As the fifth largest economy in the world, as the doorway to Pacific Rim trade and as the largest population in the nation, helping to solve our budget crisis and helping break the partisan impasse in Sacramento would swiftly lead the nation in economic recovery.

Lastly, I applaud your commitment to close Guantanamo and to reestablish the legitimate rule of law for all prisoners.  We also need to analyze and change our entire justice and prison system with the understanding that we spend more per capita on incarceration and prosecution of non-violent criminals than we do on educating young people to give them legal options. In times of economic hardship, we need to reserve expensive institutional punishment for those who truly deserve it while, diverting our resources to prevention, education and training for those most at risk, the least of our citizens. 

I learned long ago that the foundation of our Republic resides in our elementary schools where children learn to read and in our middle school where they learn to reason and in our high school where they should learn to think critically. If we fail as a nation to invest in these basic institutions and instead invest more for incarceration we will end up as just as we started, in part– a penal colony–in which there is only a dream of freedom and not the accomplishment of it.