We need a movement to save humanity from the perspective of health and well-being. Our diets are terrible, what we feed kids in schools is terrible. We don’t even have mandatory physical education in schools. It’s an economy built on consumption and profit and not on help. The only way to shift that is people like me and others continuing to speak truth to power on these issues, but also organizing from the grassroots to change it in local government, state government, and federal government.
Facts. So building off of “truth to power” I’m always fascinated by marketing messages. One of the things that you’ve said before is “If we defund police and shift funding to things like healthcare, wellness, trauma centers, drug and alcohol treatment, para-support networks, restorative justice, we don’t have a need for such a large militarized police force,” which I totally agree with you on. But I’ve become interested in why hasn’t it been positioned as something like, let’s say “refund the people.” So the question that I have, especially with how the younger folks are so involved in social media marketing messages, do you think there could be an improvement in the marketing slogans or the way that the progressive wing of the Democratic party is reaching its constituents?
Yeah, so I would ask you to not even frame this question as a “defund the police” question and frame it differently so that my answer could be different. The reason why I’m saying that is to your exact point, because it’s not even about that, it’s not even about being antagonistic towards police. I personally have moved past that, and many others have moved past that, because that term was simply a rallying cry for organizers and activists in the street during the biggest pro-Black life movement in our country’s history. So that’s what that was. It’s not a policy prescription. The policy prescription is in passing legislation and investing in a public health approach to public safety.
Now, what is a public health approach to public safety? Here’s what we know: We know that the majority of the people who are incarcerated and the majority of people who commit harm against the community, whether it’s crime or in another way, they struggle with insecure housing, poverty, complex trauma, substance abuse challenges. Mental health challenges as well. So we know that we need to invest in anti-poverty programs, education, dealing with the issue of substance abuse and mental health, housing as a human right, and just the overall nurturing and self-determination of historically marginalized communities.
It’s not a mistake that communities that were historically redlined by the US government have the highest crime rates. It is not an accident, right? When you can contrast that to a community that has low crime rates, they don’t have low crime rates because they have more police than everybody. They have low crime rates because they have resources, they have wealth. So it’s about the public health approach to public safety and investing in the nurturing, a self-determination of people within a particular community, that’s how you create communities and a nation of health and well-being—which, by the way, will support the economic development of the nation.
Joe Holder
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