Draft GPUS Platform Amendment Social Justice Chapter Introduction
2010 PLATFORM
CHAPTER NAME: SOCIAL JUSTICE
SECTION NAME: INTRODUCTION
The United States is nation of great riches and many dreams, but we are plagued by social injustices that keep us from becoming a great nation and a beacon to the rest of the world.
We have far more billionaires than any other nation, but tens of millions of us are unemployed, impoverished or hungry.
We have many of the world's best schools and universities, but we consign millions of children to schools that lack even the most basic resources.
We are blessed with great ethnic and cultural diversity, but after more than two hundred years, we still are marred by hatred, discrimination, prejudice and racism.
We possess a tremendous expanse of beautiful land, yet much of our population lives in ghettos and polluted areas, and lacks access to clean and healthy open space.
We spend hundreds of billions on military action around the world, but our infrastructure is collapsing at home.
And despite our opulence, we are the only industrialized nation in the world without a universal health care system.
We Greens are not satisfied. We believe that the heart of social justice is the fair and equitable distribution of opportunity and resources, so that all people have the chance to grow and flourish in their lifetimes.
We celebrate our nation's diversity and are committed to equal opportunity and rights for all, regardless of race, gender, religion, age, class, ethnic or national origin, sexual orientation, disability, wealth or health.
We know that our nation can only know true social justice when all members of society have a real say in the decisions that affect them. To Greens, peace, justice and democracy go hand in hand and are inseparable.
2004 PLATFORM
CHAPTER NAME: SOCIAL JUSTICE
SECTION NAME: INTRODUCTION
Historically, the United States led the world in establishing a society with democratic values such as equal opportunity and protection from discrimination. Today, however, our country is among the most extreme examples of industrialized nations that have a widening gap between the wealthy and the rest of its citizenry – the working poor, the struggling middle class, and those who increasingly cannot make ends meet.
Our public schools, from kindergarten through college, are forced to cut back countless programs and services. Fees for community colleges are up sharply, and many public universities must turn away qualified students. More than 43 million of us have no medical insurance coverage. The crisis in publicly subsidized housing is intensifying, while publicly funded “corporate welfare” continues unabated. Our tax code favors the wealthy. Our criminal justice system assigns long prison terms to hundreds of thousands of perpetrators of victimless crimes, such as selling marijuana. Our civil liberties of privacy and free speech are impaired by the excesses of the USA PATRIOT Act and kindred new laws that use a national tragedy (the attacks on September 11, 2001) as an excuse to impose ubiquitous surveillance and control over citizens. In addition, discrimination based on gender, ethnicity, or race continues to sap the potential of our society and to violate personal dignity.
Feelings of isolation and helplessness are common in our country today. Children are increasingly shaped by an “electronic childhood” with little direct experience of nature and free play. Our families are scattered, our popular culture is crassly manipulated by the profit motives of increasingly concentrated media conglomerates, and our sense of community is a pale shadow of what earlier generations in our country knew.
The Green Party strongly believes that the quality of life is determined not only by material aspects that can be measured and counted but also by elements that cannot be quantified. We firmly support the separation of church and state, but we also acknowledge the spiritual dimension of life, and we honor the cultivation of various types of spiritual experience in our diverse society.
We believe that artistic expression and a thriving structure of art institutions are key to community well-being. We believe that a deep and broad embrace of nonviolence is the only effective way to stop cycles of violence, from the home to the streets to the international level. We advocate a diverse system of education that would introduce children early to the wonders of the Great School (Nature), and would cultivate the wisdom of eco-education, eco-economics, eco-politics, and eco-culture. We seek to protect our children from the corrosive effects of mass culture that trains them to regard themselves first and foremost as consumers.
We support the shift in modern medicine to include healing through complementary therapies and engagement with the Great Hospital (Nature). We seek, in short, to facilitate the healthy unfolding of the person within the unfolding story of the family, community, bioregion, state, nation, and Earth community.
