About Me

Hi! This is my first post to medium. I am currently a high school student preparing for college, and I am 100% sure I want my career to be amongst politics, government, journalism; something of that sort.

I’m using Medium as a way to cohesively organize my thoughts on today’s current events into essays or op-eds. I don’t know if what I write on here will be a point of reference for when I actually go job hunting, but it is good experience nonetheless.

I try to stay up to date on news at all times and consider myself very well informed. I don’t rely on one or two media sources, I use a variety. Some of those that I reference may be biased one way or the other, but you’ll never see me citing Occupy Democrats, or Breitbart, as those are as close to propaganda as it can be.

My political views are as follows: I am libertarian left. As far as parties go, I am a registered Democrat, but if the primaries were open in my state, I would be an Independent. My political beliefs strongly align with a mixture of Democratic Socialism and capitalism. In other words, I feel the market should be more strongly regulated than it currently is to prevent monopolies and protect consumers and smaller businesses, but I don’t want to abolish currency or the free market the way that some with Marxist-esque beliefs do.

Simply, I believe everyone deserves the same shot in life. Under the law, everyone is technically given equal legal protections. However, the situation you are born into will play an overwhelming role in your success or lack thereof. And you have absolutely no control over that. Nor is our justice system consistent. Right now, there could be the world’s next innovator, next genius, or next Nobel Prize winner in a low-income neighborhood coming from an unstable house. They are surrounded by drug use, and violence, and bad influences from a young age, and someone that can change the world all too often ends up dying young, falling into crime, or working paycheck-to-paycheck for their entire life.

I believe that a developed nation, with the single largest economy (in terms of GDP) of any nation on Earth, can overcome most of the epidemics our country now faces if there was consensus and a consistent effort. Over 500,000 Americans are homeless right now. 10% of Americans live below the poverty level. Thousands still die every year from diseases or complications due to an inability to pay medical bills.

I do want to say, though: I’m not stuck in my own echo chamber. Not only is the county I come from split basically 50/50 in terms of who they vote for, but I can follow and understand contradictory views, even if I don’t agree with what they are saying. There is a limit to that, though. If I say in a debate, “We should raise the federal minimum wage to help the poor”, I can understand a response that assesses that more government, or raised taxes, will only worsen the problem, and that the most direct way out of poverty is rugged individualism and worth ethic. But if someone’s response to helping the poor is that they are all drug addicts and that it’s their problem, I can’t get past that. Differing political beliefs are not the same as a total lack of empathy or regard for human life just because they are not affected personally by it.

There are some things that the left and right agree on, even if they disagree on the means of doing it. To name a few:

1. Ensuring that as many citizens as possible, are as well off and comfortable as possible. It’s impossible to have a country with over 300 million people where 100 percent of the people are satisfied.
2. Protect the citizens and keep the country safe. The left-wing approach to this is usually more diplomatic, the right-wing approach to this issue is usually more militaristic. Both have worked and both have failed in different instances, but both approaches share the same primary goal. The secondary goal is where things differ; for the left, it’s protection by making peace, and for the right, it’s protection by crushing the threat.
3. Growing the economy, both for our country and so people aren’t under as much financial stress. Again, for the left the approach is more government. For the right, it is less government. But they share the same primary goal: Save people money. The difference is that Republicans cut taxes, whereas Democrats construct government programs to replace something that is deemed problematic in the private market, such as healthcare.

Regardless, this is starting to turn into more of an op-ed than an “About Me” piece, so for the sake of time I’ll end it here.

If you read this whole thing, thank you. I hope you will listen to more of what I have to say.