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What Real Change Should Bring

The realistic expectations that we, the people, can have about US domestic and foreign policies directed by President Obama, and implemented by an Obama Administration, are clearly laid out in articles by Ralph Nader and James Ridgeway, respectively.

Razor-sharp and unsentimental descriptions of the realities of US political power, and that only popular organization, action and rebellion — not elections — will ever capture control of that power and focus it squarely on human needs, are given by Morton Skorodin and Carlos Fierro. All this seems obvious to me (I voted for Nader-Gonzalez), but then, life has brought me to this point, and I realize that like Robinson Crusoe I am washed up on a shore quite remote from popular consciousness.

As a matter of decency, I think it better to have Obama victorious, to reward his campaign for not being as overtly racist and unprincipled as was McCain’s. A red-blue map shows McCain carrying the “slave states” or the Confederacy, and hang ’em high ‘Klan Kountry,’ where evolution, unfortunately, is slow.

To my mind, what our country needs (and by extension the rest of the world) is a consciousness based on rationality and compassion, operating through a politics based on democratic socialism, or democratic communism. To couch things negatively: capitalism must be destroyed, religion must be abandoned. “To each according to his and her needs, from each according to his and her abilities.”

As a physicist, I know that it is objectively possible to arrange our world affairs so every human being experiences a fulfilling life in a real, earthly paradise.

Make poverty history, make justice commonplace, make thought liberating, make compassion universal.

MANUEL GARCIA, Jr. is a retired physicist. E-mail = mango@idiom.com