Secret Women's Business

Having toyed with what I might do to make America a safer and kinder place , it is time I turned my attention to cleaning up our own back yard, so to speak. As was my plan for the United States, I would love to explore how to do community-building as a priority. This does not take money so much as vision. How can we make our society more interconnected, so our elderly do not sit alone, so our young mums do not go insane with boredom, so our youth do not feel so alone they fall into serious depression and self-harm? I would love to listen to experts on community-building. I would love to talk to churches, community groups, sporting groups, the media, and anyone who will listen, really, about how we can get to know our neighbours and create support groups where needed. Wouldn't it be awesome if we got really, really serious about knowing and caring for our neighbours? Bring it on. I would make sure we keep our commitments on giving 0.7% of our GDP in well-targeted development acc...

My friend Alan Hirsch, in a ridiculous moment, suggested I should be President of the United States, so I decided to play around with the idea. I think it would be necessary to declare a day of national mourning that the country had managed to elect someone so spectacularly incompetent, but then, it wouldn't be the first time... perhaps I'll skip that idea.* My next concern be to do something about America's deficit... 16 trillion dollars is a lot of debt, and much of it is unproductive. My first target would be military spending. Spending around five times more than the next most heavily invested country in military spending seems completely disproportionate... spending twice as much would still make the US a military superpower. I think I will be moderate and cut defense spending in half, freeing up $355.5 billion dollars annually. I'd also like to do something about incarceration rates... the financial cost, and the cost in terms of human misery, is a terr...