In a previous era new year’s resolutions were frequently formulated and in numerous instances discarded by many almost immediately subsequent to their implementation; casualties of a lack of discipline or overwhelmed by a resurgent wave of apathy or volitional paralysis.

In that they were almost entirely concerned with matters of personal improvement and the evolution of individual elements of consciousness. conduct, or behavior dispensing with their presence minimally impacted their lives and their welfare, of those so affected.

However, in this year of 2020 no such frivolity is permissible. We as a society are the collective captives of a culture that is unraveling; amidst the intensifying forces of ideological warfare, authoritarianism , racial animosity, and the recrudescence of a pernicious sentiment that rejects the legitimacy of those immigrants who wish so desperately to become residents of this country.

As a result what is required at this moment of our national life is to engage in an activity not of solipsistic considerations or the self-absorbed dynamic of introspection to appease our desires to become more attractive, affluent, or sophisticated in our intellectual observations, but rather to engage in the imperative collective endeavor that seeks as its crucial objective the construction of a political and social agenda that both heals our fractures and reflects a normative content that when implemented shall contain by the richness of those provisions and edicts of social and economic justice the capability to inaugurate an unprecedented era of mutual affirmation and a robust and expanding climate of comity among all who dwell within our borders.

At the epicenter of this agenda are concerns that are both macroeconomic and political in character and reflect the following specific considerations:

An explicit commitment by our populace and those major institutions in every sector of our society to the formulation and implementation of a ten- year strategic paradigm/process by which poverty shall be eradicated within the United States.

The accomplishment of this objective requires the formal inter-institutional collaboration of the philanthropic community, major public and private corporations, particularly those within the financial segment of our economy.

In addition, the specific participation of municipal, county, state, and federal echelons of activity and operation will be required, as will those entities that exist within faith-based environments both as public statements of support for this objective by those organizations that comprise these theologies, and the deployment of the financial and technical aspects of those nonprofit entities within their orbit that provide the gamut of social services to these impoverished constituencies.

So too will the engagement of those technology behemoths that sit astride our culture and those companies who are engaged in that dimension of our public life e.g. the components of our structure of electronic and print media. be crucially vital.

From this mammoth structure of the primary components of our nation will the energy, resources, commitment, and unceasing exertions be tirelessly forthcoming to accomplish the reality of a society which has eradicated poverty and as the result of this crucial accomplishment the promises inherent in the pronouncements of our forefathers at the moment of our founding as a political sovereignty shall become fully manifest in the daily operational reality of those dynamics that animate our cultural life.

The elimination of impoverishment within our nation shall reduce the current enmities which material insufficiency currently fuels. Its abolition will greatly diminish the efficacy of those forces that seek to obstruct the progress of African-Americans to accumulate the financial resources and assets which their Caucasian fellow citizens have acquired.

Its substantial diminution shall deflate the incendiary rhetoric of those who would prohibit immigrants of disparate races and religions from being admitted to our shores as members of our national populace.

Its significant decrease will negatively impact the incidence of social dysfunction, alcohol and drug addiction, and other forms of pathology to which they have succumbed in their desperate attempts to nullify the excruciating suffering and hopelessness which a life of chronic hunger and homelessness has percipitated.

Though there shall remain numerous points of contention and disagreement among our citizens that relate to substantive issues of political options and policy choices as well as a spectrum of social issues on which fierce and spirited debate will continue, they will not pose the threat to the maintenance of our democracy and our constitutional order which our current climate of rabid hostility and intolerance and the condemnation of perspectives and normative preferences that are escalating in both tone and intensity, which if they remain in their posture of ascendancy may cause our republic to unravel.

What I am asserting in some fundamental regard is that when reduced to its most irreducible ingredient, that which lies at the predicate of much of our current civil strife and mutual belligerency are the tragic realities of the apportionment of wealth within a calculus of unprecedented inequality where so few have amassed extraordinary fortunes and so many among us survive on an apportionment that is so meager. It is this stark and central fact from which so much of our unhappiness and despair emanate and when we have repaired this glaring moral abomination and rectified this ultimate source of conflict and injustice at the very epicenter of America the atmosphere and environment in which all our citizens coexist shall become a source of well-being and contentment, a provider of amicable social relationships and the fount from which we may behaviorally realize the equality of all men and women and their undeniable and immemorial right to lives of freedom, opportunity, and material adequacy.

It is to this activity we should be dedicated rather that the infinitely more modest and comparatively unworthy allocation of our energies in the pursuit of self-absorbed goals and intrinsically meaningless aspirations.