Well, 2015, while you were fantastic to me, you were an immense failure to people I love and care about.For the women in my life, access to safe and legal abortion was limited and undermined at every turn. Non-white people spent the entire year wondering if this was the day that they were going to encounter a police officer and end up dead because they were not sufficiently subservient. We all spent our time looking over our shoulder, expecting an active shooter at any moment in any place.
So here’s the thing, rather than making my own New Year’s Resolutions, I’m making some for America:
1) Remove Grand Juries and Prosecutors from decisions about whether to indict police officers. Eliminate the incestuous relationship between prosecutors and law enforcement so that cops are held accountable for their dangerous, bad, illegal decisions.
2) Gun control. Now. Literally, I don’t care what you do, but you have to do SOMETHING. Whether it is background checks or collecting all the guns and firing them into the sun, I don’t care. But you must do something. Now.
3) Eliminate barriers to abortion. Abortion is about recognizing that women have as much of a right to their own body as the rest of us. No other person, no matter their relationship to you, has a right to your body. Period. Women deserve the same. Period. Even when that person is growing inside them and will die otherwise. There is no difference, and patronizing arguments that people should just not get pregnant if they don’t want to be pregnant are as ignorant as they are uncaring.
4) Deport Donald Trump. I don’t care where you send him. Mars. Just get rid of that cancer. You’re better without the fear and anger that he is preying on. He and his brand of xenophobia and racism are dangerous.
5) For that matter, toxic masculinity has got to go. Stop policing other people’s gender. Quit believing that there is some magic universal truth about what it means to be “masculine” or “feminine.” There isn’t, and what works for you isn’t what works for everyone, so stop trying to impose your own brand of self-expression on everyone else.
America, you’ve got a lot of work to do. And this list doesn’t even scratch the surface. We will touch base periodically, but if you can’t get your act together, and fast, we are going to have to break up. You’ve got your marching orders, 2016. Now get to work.
god america i 