How to make American great again

To the editor: First, I agree with President Trump that America isn’t as great as it once was. It has slipped from its greatest nation status to one that is lagging most of the advanced industrialized countries, and whose international status is being actively and massively contested by China. China has a multitrillion-dollar budget surplus that is being used to extend its influence throughout the Far East and into Africa and South America. America has a multitrillion-dollar debt, more than a trillion dollars owed to China, which will soon be our economic and military equal.

I also agree that Mr. Trump and the Republican Congress could regain America’s prior greatness but only if they focus on the right problems. Keeping people with dark skins out of America is not one of them. Undoing all the good things accomplished by Mr. Trump’s predecessors is not one of them. Avoiding prosecution of our president for colluding with our enemy in the current cyberwar with Russia isn’t, either. Reducing the size of the government we need to protect us in that cyberwar and not administering the sanctions that are our only defense in it, certainly aren’t.

What Mr. Trump and his Republican colleagues need to do is rejoin the Paris Climate Accord. Today, America is the only country in the world that is not a subscriber to that accord. We were a leading force in it. The U.S. is facing larger and more powerful hurricanes. Receding coastlines from rising ocean levels are forcing us to move coastal villages in Alaska several miles inland. We at least need to wake up to climate change.

America should not be promoting coal, the fuel of the past; it should retake the lead from China in developing the fuel of the future, solar and wind. While Europe and China have high-speed railways, America cannot even repair its crumbling infrastructure: its aging roads, bridges, water and sewer systems. If Republicans would talk to leaders in the field of medicine, hospital administration, and public health they could give America the best universal health care system in the world. That would ratchet us up a notch toward regaining our post-World War II greatness.

America is the only advanced industrial nation without affordable college education for our children. Most of our children graduate with a burdensome debt that constrains their spending capacity for years after graduation. Four states, Tennessee, Oregon, New York and Maryland, now have free community college, allowing those without the wherewithal for universities to begin in a community college. If students do well there, they could get financial aid to attend a regular university for their junior and senior years. That splendid idea throughout the nation would also help make America great again, for education is the foundation of productivity.

We can’t even protect our children from being murdered in the schools they attend. Twenty first-graders were murdered at Sandy Hook back in 2012, and Congress voted down a bill to just register all guns. Americans seem to the world to love guns more than children, even though more people have children than guns. Congress consistently votes down even minor regulations of our right to own and use any guns we please anyway we please, even when the vast majority of us want those regulations.

The only way American will ever be great again is by following the progressive agenda. We will not make it great again by peeling back the few paltry benefits we already receive from the U.S. government.

Robert Beard

Professor emeritus

Linguistics and Russian programs

Bucknell University

Lewisburg

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