Among the ranks of our most competent public health experts are those who assert that the creation and maintenance of a national cultural environment in which we are released from the imprisonment of the pandemic which is currently wreaking such havoc on both our individual psyches and our economic institutions, may not be achieved before the advent of 2022.

It is at that moment they contend when a combination of vaccines, the attainment of ” herd immunity” and other associated social practices we have implemented to retard the expansion of this pathogen among our citizens, will have collectively denuded this biblical scourge of its capability to inflict great suffering and death.

Whatever the accuracy of their predictions obviously it will not be possible to either confirm or refute their presumptions for many months, surely our previous life as a society has been substantially altered and the probability that when we resume the operational dynamics and rhythms that were extant before the onset of this virus, its structural configurations and primary institutions may in some substantial regard be irrevocably altered.

Thus, as this interregnum lengthens and we remain the hostages of an involuntary quarantine beyond such obvious measures as deploying various safeguards against the contraction of this fatal malady on behalf of our families and ourselves, the question I wish to pose to those who encounter this essay is the following: “Are you content to return to an involvement in our diurnal activities that is a replication of those atmospheric influences and forces that were previously ascendant?”

More specifically, is it your wish when life resumes throughout America to be a participant in the strife and enmities that are rendering our republic asunder? Do you seek a reengagement in the conflicts and political and rhetorical combat that is so prevalent and injurious to the maintenance of our democracy?

In my view if we return to a societal reality that is nothing but the resumption of the hostilities and our re-immersion in uncompromising ideological doctrines in which we view those with whom we disagree not as opponents but as enemies, and the ultimate fate derived from that collective perspective will produce a national future that witnesses a dissolution of our democracy either in the form of secession or civil insurrection.

For under these circumstances our triumph over the coronavirus will justly be regarded as a hollow and most tragic accomplishment, given the equally lethal cultural circumstances in which our daily activities will once again resume.

In numerous recent conversations with those whose normative postures and intellectual acuity I value and respect one question continually resurfaces: In the absence of an alternative paradigm to the contemporary and ascendant structure of neoliberalism with all its grotesque moral defects, material inequalities and impoverishment, and the continued diminution of the potency and impact the majoritarian will of our citizens can obtain in the realm of those public determinations our elected officials formulate, what else is accessible to our polity but in postures of outrage and resistance to return to the struggles in which we have been embroiled for the past half-century.

Thus, beyond all else what is absent at this moment in our nation’s existence is both an ethical framework which delineates a humanistic vision of the optimal manner in which we should organize our society, and the political and economic instruments and institutions which shall translate that overarching moral construct that radiates and reflects as its ascendant reality, a seminal commitment to the principles of social justice and its vibrant and continuous presence at the epicenter of our nation that dwarfs all other concerns and considerations in its importance.

In the second installment of this exposition I shall provide the reader with both the current scholastic efforts that are transpiring beneath the banner of my organization, The Fund For An Equitable America, which is at the forefront of those endeavors our nation’s re-founding fathers and mothers are formulating; and subsequent to the completion of these efforts the political strategies and initiatives that will be imperative for our citizens to ferociously commit their unrelenting energies and volition, to achieve the implementation of a humanist alternative to our present system that is so replete with grievous authoritarian defects and mammoth moral deficiencies.

The final element of this crucial exercise in social scientific scholarship will be a comprehensive and particularistic tactical primer, that will fully delineate the requisite multi-faceted campaign we must deploy to accomplish the complete, systematic, political decapitation of this nation’s oligarchy, that by its dismemberment shall forever preclude the possibility of its recrudescence or resurrection.