Pageant Question 5: What bothers you most about what is happening in this country today?

I grew up on Sesame Street, Mister Rogers, and Mister Dress-Up (we're very near the Canadian border.)  In the 1970s, the wave of 60s peace and love and caring was still riding high.  I remember the public service announcement with the Indian crying over the pile of garbage.  I remember seeing people of all kinds holding hands and wishing to teach the world to sing.  We seemed on our way to a place where the air was clean and we were always polite and friendly.  What bothers me most about this country today is that money has trumped care: care of our world and care for each other.

It doesn't seem like we learned the lessons of the 1970s' energy crisis or the eating away of the ozone layer by air conditioning and Aqua Net.  I was taught by my childhood TV shows to care about Mother Nature.  We turned off the water when we brushed, and we picked up garbage outside.  Today, it appears better with recycling bins in every home and paper products being made out of recycled materials, but it is not as good as it seems.  If we truly cared, we wouldn't be tearing down forests at all.  We'd use hemp.  If we truly cared, we wouldn't put our water in disposable plastic bottles.  We'd keep our water clean enough to use tap.  Hummers and 8-cylinder trucks, the resistance to renewable energy: how did we get here?  Money.  Money prevents us from change; otherwise, we would live in a world cared for by us.  But it's not just the environment that is missing out on care because of big money, it's each other.

Why does the United States still have people who go hungry?  Why do we still have homeless?  Why do we still have illiterates?  Why do we not take care of them all?  Money.  Again, it's money.  I learned empathy from my childhood TV shows, and I believe it is our duty to care for one another, so how did "being on the dole" come to be an epithet?  Schools are defunded and programs for education eliminated.  People with psychiatric needs are forced out onto the streets instead of being cared for.  Money.  Money goes to those who have money, and those who have money find ways of holding on to their money and making more money.  Money, says the US Supreme Court, is speech, which to me means that we are not all equal because my voice is not as loud, and others cannot be heard at all.  Love of money trumps love of humankind.

If we had chosen to stay on the path towards caring for our Earth and caring for each other rather than caring for money more, we would be living in a much better world by now.  What bothers me most about what is happening in this country today is the lack of care we show.  It seems the only thing we care about is ourselves, and it shows.  I urge everyone to imagine the world this could have been if the ideas of peace and love were not relegated to "hippies", but embraced by humankind.  Where would we be today, and where could we be tomorrow?