If you have ever been in a fender bender car accident, you know at the sound of the crunch the present moment is already the second casualty. Red and blue lights form to fill out the changed ambiance, and strange people you don’t know arguing fault fill the day that perhaps your drifting concentration brought down. The night of this last election the bus that carried my hopes for the future rolled over and hope fled. While simultaneously praying I was wrong, my life experience told me hope can only be found again in the next generations for our generation had wrecked the conveyance. Thus is the birthing ground for this idea of the Next Democracy. 

The fifth Virtue for the Next Democracy, Primacy of Priorities for the Children and the Earth. 

One doesn’t need to be married or single, gay or straight, tall or short, white, brown, black or mixed race to care for children.  One simply needs to be human.  It is human at the level of species that we inherit a drilled in, in common, biological capacity to care for and keep safe infants and children.  Not everyone, gender, social status and race aside, is cut out to parent or raise children but we are admonished by our religions or life experience to care for the safety, nurturance,  protection and well being of all the very young born to this hazardous world. 

And all of these children will need a healthier planet earth to receive them and their futures. We all know the storms of these seasons are stronger and more brutal.  We can feel the heat of summer so intensely we shiver to think what would happen to our civilization went one month without the energy hungry air conditioning in August.  Rain that once came in drops now comes in buckets.   Yes, things are changing rapidly on this planet and yet we elect people who lock us into a game of chicken with nature to increase the extravagant wealth of a few adults.  There are farmers, ranchers, bakers, teachers, bikers, foresters, lumbar jacks, artists and care givers who can see the changes and need only the permission of their cultures and economies to respond to earth as they would so readily respond to the needs of their children and infants.  There is really not so much difference between this precious blue globe and the helpless infant who spikes a fever in the night; only the scale of time and nurturance. 

This fundamental fifth virtue must to have a recognizable position on the top of any future political party’s platform.   Rage and anger at past leaders is insufficient fuel to get us into the Next Democracy. Vote for their capacity and commitment to care for children and their future on a planet that is listing toward disaster.  The party and candidates in the next two election cycles who genuinely reflect your fifth virtue cares will find in your political commitment their new majority for the Next Democracy. 

Good is understanding that, somehow and despite all, Americans can be good people and probably in their confused hearts they are waiting for a good message to awaken their desire to care in the way their nature and often their God has instructed them. Perhaps our suppressed capacity to care on the scale of politics is the untapped truth of this quarter century. For us who have awakened to the danger, we have to concede our last gifts to this time will be how we stage the future’s sense of health and goodness.