WHAT COMES NEXT: A MANIFESTO

Where We Are

We have a cancer on the body politic. And we now know how to prevent cancer.

A lunatic is making life difficult for eight billion people around the world—all for a handful of billionaires and millionaires, including himself. He sacrifices humanity for power and money. This is corrupt capitalism in its rawest, most grotesque form.

He doesn’t even hide it anymore. The abuse. The corruption. The nepotism. He’s just a crook, a felon, a predator with his hands on nuclear weapons and America’s treasury, playing God and jury and imperial dictator over the world.

But here’s what they don’t want you to know: he’s underwater. Seventy percent of Americans disapprove. We haven’t given up on democracy: they’ve just connived their version as the only one and are trying to convince us it’s inevitable. But we see it for what it is: white supremacy, Christian nationalism, and the concentration of wealth in the hands of the top one percent who are gleeful about taking away our right to vote, our right to have a say in our government, our access to education and economic security.

They’ve twisted faith into a weapon. Christian fundamentalists who think if they hate the right people, immigrants, LGBTQ folks, women who want bodily autonomy, Jesus will approve. They’ve forgotten everything Christ actually called us to do: feed the hungry, heal the sick, welcome the stranger, serve the least among us. They’ve made religion about exclusion and punishment instead of love and service.

How did we get here?

Hubris. Dismissing patients. Not believing women. Greed and cruelty. Profit over people, every single time.

We built a society that called women with credible accounts of assault liars. We built a medical system that measured the wrong things and then blamed patients when the instruments failed. We built a government that let pharmaceutical companies fund the regulators, write the guidelines, suppress research on generics, and profit from human suffering for sixty-six years.

Wrong thinking. A false paradigm. A way of seeing the world that was never real.

The Inflection Point

You have inflamed the political discourse with your rhetoric. You are the nadir of American life, and every day you remain in the White House instead of behind bars is a sacrilege to our secular temple of democracy.

The American people have rejected you and your divisive, profit-over-people politics. Your poll numbers are the lowest ever recorded. You’re desperately building a billion-dollar ballroom bunker to hide from the outcome of fair elections. You’re spending a billion dollars a day on a war with Iran that no one wanted. Gas prices are through the roof, and you’ve said publicly that you don’t care about affordability when making decisions for the American people.

The culture of cruelty that created you and sustained you must come to an end.

You have been convicted of sexual assault and have likely hurt many more women. The culture of sexism that protected you must come to an end. A society that would dismiss credible accusations and call survivors liars is over.

You demolished USAID—a program that exported American values in the form of humanitarian aid to people who needed it most. Disgusting. You’ve overseen concentration camps and human rights violations. You’ve sold off public lands to investors. You’ve chosen healthcare over health, treating symptoms while systematically ignoring prevention because there’s no profit in people getting well.

It’s all on the line now.

What Comes Next

Recognition

We see you now. All of you.

We see the coalition aligned against the rest of us: the billionaires who hoard wealth while children go hungry, the fundamentalists who have corrupted faith to serve power instead of people, the corrupt politicians who serve money over constituents, and the profiteers who have turned human suffering into a business model.

We see how you’ve stoked our anger to keep us hating each other, because when we’re busy hating each other, we don’t notice that you’re making off with all the profit, all the resources, all the opportunity.

But we’re done with that now. We are more alike than unalike, and our DNA proves it. We will no longer allow our anger to be weaponized against us. We will no longer put people in power who ignore the needs of the people they’re supposed to serve.

Repair

We are going to repair what’s been broken.

We’re going to repair democracy—the right to vote, fair elections, a government that actually serves people instead of billionaires. We’re going to repair our relationship with truth. Medicine will look upstream, not just downstream. Science will be funded by the public good, not pharmaceutical profit.

We’re going to repair justice. There will be accountability for assault, for corruption, for cruelty. The culture that protected predators and dismissed victims is over.

We’re going to repair our relationship with the Earth. We will protect our forests and oceans—our home. We will invest in sensible alternative energy. We will recognize that we are part of the web of life, not parasites feeding on it. We are stewards, not conquerors.

We’re going to repair economic security. No more children living in poverty in the wealthiest country on Earth. Childcare for all. Food for everyone who needs it. We have the resources—to say we don’t is a lie, and we’re done pretending otherwise.

We’re going to repair safety. We will stop the senseless gun violence. No child should be at risk of being murdered in their school. No parent should lie awake at night wondering if their baby will come home.

And we’re going to repair our relationship with our own bodies. No more blame and shame for bodies doing exactly what they were designed by evolution to do. Respect for all sexes and genders. An end to reducing women to objects meant to be used and discarded.

Repent

We have to acknowledge where we failed.

We dismissed patients when they told us they were suffering. We didn’t believe women when they came forward with the truth. We let greed and cruelty shape our systems—medical, political, economic. We measured the wrong things and then blamed people when the instruments we built couldn’t capture what mattered.

We let profit dictate what got studied, what got funded, what got prescribed. And people died. People suffered for decades with diseases we were capable of preventing since 1960.

We repent. We own it. We commit to doing better, not as empty words, but as action.

Rebuild

We are going to rebuild a city upon a hill—one known for our values, not our weapons. A new dawn for humanity where we are not stuck in reactivity, not suffering from chronic inflammatory diseases we’ve been capable of preventing for more than half a century.

A better world. One we are capable of building together.

Not a utopia. We’re not naive. But better. Kinder. More just. Actually achievable if we commit to the work.

The Vision

Imagine people healed. Thriving. In service to one another.

We band together across old dividing lines. Different coalitions, different alignments, all committed to building a world with better education, economic security, and healthcare that actually prevents disease instead of profiting from it. A world with respect for all faith traditions—no established church in America, but deep respect for Islamic, Jewish, Christian, and all spiritual paths as roads toward a better world. Because every great faith tradition calls us to the same work: serve one another, care for the vulnerable, protect the Earth, choose love over hate.

A world where diversity is recognized as the strength that nature chose for us, where we don’t demonize people for who they love as adults.

A world with protected forests, clean oceans, and public lands held in trust for future generations. With childcare and food security and freedom from gun violence. With an end to profit-over-people politics and the corrupt systems that sustain it.

We step into our own power now. We, the decent and good people of Earth, are more powerful than the special interests who have been trying to divide us. They’ve been making life difficult for eight billion people, and we’re saying: no more.

Now Is Our Time

This is the moment. Speak up. Protest. Organize. Vote. Reject the cruelty, the corruption, the obscene concentration of wealth. Reject any faith twisted to serve power instead of people. Reject the false choice between healthcare and health, between profit and people, between cruelty and care.

We are the transformation we’ve been waiting for. We are the new world trying to be born. We are what comes next.

A new time for our species: not dominated by inflammation, literal or political. Not trapped in systems designed to extract profit from suffering.

Healed. Thriving. Together.

This is what comes next. And it starts now.