I believe that we should use our enormous wealth and power to help those in the world less fortunate, by accident of birth, than we are.  We must remember that we didn't have anything to do with where we were born, or under what economic or political conditions.  Jesus wrote more about helping the poor than anything else except maybe legalism.  We must not buy into the lie that some people in the world are "beyond help" or are "born evil."
          We must not shirk our responsibilities as the world's most powerful nation, but as such we must eschew violence in all but the most desperate of occasions.  For as we use violence, so will other nations model their violent behavior after ours.  I believe that we should have a strong and powerful military, as befits the most powerful nation on earth, and should maintain enough strength to repel any attack from any two nations at the same time.  I believe that our military should be centered on defense, and not on the capabilities to export our beliefs at the point of a gun.  If a country is in need of our help militarily, they should request so through the proper international organizations.  We should re-allocate "defense" spending to a greater vigilance of our borders and especially our ports.  The huge amount of container shipping coming into our ports every day uninspected is one of the gravest threats Americans face.
          I do not believe that simply throwing money at the poor whether it is at home or abroad is the solution to the problem of poverty.  This was tried overseas in the 1970's and 80's and literally trillions of dollars were wasted on corrupt governments and dictators who simply squirreled the money away in Swiss or offshore banks.  I agree with the decision of the Bush administration to tie loans and grants to Developing Nations to certain behavioral markers.  We have that right as lenders.  I do not, however, believe in "Tied Aid," which is the proviso that foreign aid to countries is contingent upon "buying American;" 70% of our foreign aid is tied aid.  While this understandably helps out American business, it often puts aid workers in needy countries in the untenable position of either paying much more for a particular item, or trying to get their money elsewhere.  Paying five times as much for an AIDS drug from an American pharmaceutical company as opposed to a generic version just means that five times as fewer people will get the drug.
          I believe that the American president, whether it is this one or the next one, should throw down the gauntlet to American industry and science to come up with an energy source that will make us independent of oil in ten years.  This would be on the order of John F. Kennedy's pledge to land a man on the moon by the end of the 1960s.           I believe that we should rejoin the family of nations, and stop acting as if the United States owns the earth.  There is a phrase in the entertainment industry, "You meet the same people on the way up that you do on the way down." If for no other reason, nations have memories, too.  I believe that we are at a critical moment in the ecological life of our planet.  It is up to the people of this and the next generation or two to reverse the terrible strain that unfettered industry and unstoppable energy use has put on the finite resources and mortal ecosystems of the earth.  We cannot leave this problem for someone else.
          I believe that Christians should release themselves from the clutches of the Religious Right, and become independent voters and thinkers, judging all issues on the moral teachings of Jesus Christ, and not just the narrow few offered by these groups, keeping in mind that Jesus said more about poverty and greed than he did about any other transgressions.  I believe that "moral values" are not the property of the Republican Party, the Conservative Right, or Christian fundamentalists who happen to speak the loudest on this issue.  Moral values represent a much larger spectrum of issues than these people even begin to approach.
          I believe that I am not naive in thinking that there is a nonviolent way to resolve our problems internationally, and that it is not part of Jesus's teaching to kill an innocent person in order to save another innocent person.  I believe that revenge, that most human of emotions, is not an option for Christians.  I believe that the life of an Iraqi mother and her child is equal to the life of two New York stockbrokers, or two unborn fetuses.  I believe that if politicians had to send their own children to war, there would be a lot less war.
          I believe that the government should pay for elections, with each major candidate getting a set amount of money, and the campaign season running a set amount of weeks.  I believe the people of this country have done an incredible job within two generations in wiping out the social divide that existed between the white and the black races.  There still remains a lot of work to be done to level the field economically.  According to Internal Revenue Services statistics, the top one-tenth of one percent of Americans had more income in 2003 than the bottom one third of all Americans.  Call me Red, but I don't think this is the least bit fair, or the least bit Christian.
          I believe that people of other faiths around the world, whether misguided or not, believe in their faiths as much or more as we believe in ours, and for our political leaders to invoke the name of God in the righteousness of our cause only inflames tensions and hatred and turns what is a political problem into a clash of fundamentalisms.
          I believe that the right to bear firearms, written into the Constitution when the country had less than two people per square mile and more dangerous wild animals than people, is dangerously and provably outdated, and causes more harm and misery than good.  I believe that in the same way that you cannot yell "Fire!" in a crowded movie theater, companies mass-marketing violent video games to children (like the one that makes killing the most policemen the object of the game) should not be protected by freedom of speech laws.  I believe that somewhere in the future, when historians and anthropologists are unraveling the details our culture, they will come to the conclusion that video games did much more harm to the progress of our society than anyone today can imagine.
          I believe that the tragedy of 9/11 gave our nation a once-in-a-generation opportunity to lead the world by example and to model the qualities that once made our country the envy of the world; instead, they heard the rhetoric of the Old West, and saw the all too familiar "bomb early and bomb often" response that has sadly become our government's solution to resolving most conflicts.  I believe that the United States can never be an honest broker in the Israeli- Palestinian tragedy because we are neither neutral nor impartial.  I believe that Jerusalem should be an international city.
          George W. Bush is counting on the "judgment of history," a subject that he is woefully unfamiliar with, to retrieve his good standing from the dumpster of failed American presidents. He likens his predicament to Harry Truman, who ended his presidency with similar poll numbers but has been rehabilitated by more recent historians. I believe that this will not happen to President Bush, and that history will render the judgment that he has been the worst president in the history of the United States of America.