You want to be a patriot?
Start caring about your fellow societal members.
Start valuing those things that are not shiny and flashy.
Stop worshipping social influencers, celebrities and athletic freaks and be more grateful for teachers, truck drivers and clerks of all kinds.
Start empathizing with those, through no fault of their own, who find themselves in dire circumstances.
Start putting yourself into the shoes of those who find themselves at the bottom of society's pyramid with little chance of moving upward.
The SARS Coronavirus 2 pandemic is the best argument ever for the re-creation of our society. It is revealing the flaws in our so-called system every single day.
And, by the re-creation of our society, I mean, a better version of capitalism. Not the utter demolition of capitalism. Just a saner version.
We need to choose to do the right thing - as a society. We must make an effort individually as well but it has to be society-at-large to be a game changer.
There is no longer time to kick these cans down the road.
We're America. The United States of America. Not the Autonomous States of America.
We can devise a path forward as good or better than any other country has ever developed.
We've seen how the health care we have now is ill-equipped to handle a disaster of this nature. We have too many Americans who are uninsured or underinsured. We have too many Americans whose health care fully depends on their having a job, and keeping that job.
We have too many Americans - and I am going to place myself in this category - who have health insurance but still are fearful of ending up in a hospital with mounting bills that they will never be capable of paying. Eventually, society winds up paying for these little humanitarian disasters.
Andrew Yang, the entrepreneur who was briefly in the Democratic presidential primary and whose one word slogan was "MATH", determined his Universal Basic Income idea should be called the Freedom Dividend because it polled better with conservatives.
Maybe conservatives would be more comfortable talking about Medicare For All or Universal Health Care if we couched it in the way they like to hear things? Explain that you don't want what Canada has, or Sweden has or what the Communist Chinese have.
You want an uniquely American health care solution. Our own version that will be worlds better than any other country. And, once it is implemented, we can all go online in a massive nationwide Zoom conference and chant, "USA! USA! USA!"
How are we going to pay for it?
"USA! USA! USA!"