The boring 2020 US presidential race is well on its way, with just a few months left before its November finish. The main and maybe the only real project of the Democratic Party is to kick Donald Trump out of the White House and to keep him from a second term.

It is true that this election is important, but not for the reasons they sell us. This election is important because things have to change, and change profoundly and rapidly. We need to turn around the destructive direction of our present day society. We need a strong cultural change, something like a nonviolent cultural revolution, and we should use this political space and the Biden candidacy to move our society forward and produce these much-needed transformations. The future of humanity is in question.

The main issue that engulfs everything else is violence and the use of it in all its forms: physical, economical, racial, sexual, religious, moral. This culture of violence is causing this crisis, and nothing is being done to stop it.

Here are some of the ways this violence is being manifested:

  • The Environment: The United States, with just over 4% of the world’s population, is responsible for almost a third of the excess carbon dioxide that is heating the planet. The 28 countries of the European Union, taken as a group, come in just behind the United States in historical emissions. So, if we combine the US and Europe, the White-West is responsible for over 60% of the excess carbon dioxide.
  • Concentration of Capital, mainly by the white community, is producing a growing gap between rich and poor. African Americans, for example, lost 40% of their small businesses during COVID  time. Amazon and other tech behemoths are seeing their profits sky-rocket during one of the worst worldwide pandemics. Today, the average white family has roughly 10 times the wealth as the average black family, and white college graduates have over seven times more wealth than black college graduates.
  • Militarization, nuclear weapons and a disproportionate military budget are used by our country to bully the rest of humanity. Domestic police use military equipment to assault and kill people of color in the streets of US cities and 36,000 Americans are killed by guns each year—an average of 100 per day.
  • Our current formal democracy, which relies on a disconnected form of representation with minimal participation called voting, hasn’t evolved much over the past two hundred years. Even within this outdated system, there is outright disregard of voting rights, especially among communities of color. In some neighborhoods in New York City, less than 50% of the population is eligible to vote.

The white community needs to stand up and take responsibility for the failure of the dominant values of competition and extreme individualism, which in turn have led to the concentration of power and wealth, the use of violence as the primary way to resolve conflicts, and rampant discrimination against minority cultures and people of color.

If you take to the street for the freedom not to wear a mask, you have picked the wrong fight. The mask is not about YOU; like a driver’s license, it is meant to stop you killing other people. The only real freedom you have is to liberate yourself from violence and contradiction, and to choose to begin treating others the way you want to be treated. But before doing that, you need to recognize that you currently have very little freedom in your own life. You didn’t pick your primary language, you had very little choice about the work you are doing, you didn’t chose the God you believe in or the religion you belong to. You have no power over how your tax dollars are spent (mainly to kill people). You didn’t chose the country you were born in. Have you ever questioned for a minute the type of sexual partner (gender) you are most comfortable with? You have one form of marriage, one economic system, one flag on your lawn.

Maybe now you see the need for us to make some intentional decisions. It is our job to tell our potential future employee, Joe Biden, what to do. We pay the President’s salary with our tax dollars, so let’s not waste it. Let’s get out of our nihilism, learn from our mistakes, reconcile with our enemies, and stop the violence. Let’s implement a Universal Basic Income. Let’s ban nuclear weapons. Let’s pay reparations to African-Americans. Let’s reduce the US military budget by 10% in order to pay for green energy development. Let Biden know what his political program will be. Let’s DO IT because without us nothing is going to change.