Ew

Now that I'm well on the way to full recovery, I am looking forward to getting more involved in my community and hopefully making a positive impact for those that come after me.

I'm fortunate to have had a wonderful medical team that helped me jump through the hoops of being a transgender and the nightmare that is health insurance.

But as of yesterday, I no longer have any medical restrictions! I'm still recovering, but after over a year of near constant, appendicitis level pain, it's nice to be able to just walk again.

Finally, in November 2024, I was scheduled to get surgery. Then, the freak windstorm in Washington knocked out the power in the hospital I was supposed to get surgery...so in December, I finally got surgery. Oh, they also saw evidence my appendix had some issues.

I then was diagnosed with endometriosis and tried medication to ease the pain, It didn't and the side effects made things worse. Finally, it was recommended I get a hysterectomy. Because I'm trans, I had to jump through so many more hoops than a cis woman.

This still doesn't completely end the burden of the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer. We need to enforce a standard ratio of CEOs to their average-paid and lowest-paid employees. We need a maximum wage ratio to ensure that the socioeconomic divide decreases.

Once our taxes are squared away and the rich are actually paying, we'll start having more money for a budget to help with new items to benefit the people. This includes universal healthcare (which is cheaper than private insurance), free or reduce cost higher education, and funding public school.

I also despise sales taxes. Sales taxes have the most detrimental impact on the poorest of us. It passes off the rich's expenses onto us by making us pay more. We should move more towards income tax over sales tax to ensure we can have public-funded options to benefit society.

We then need to overhaul our entire tax system. We need to simplify our tax code and close all loopholes. The loopholes that are supposed to help the lower classes almost always benefit the rich. Why should we have billionaires? They horde wealth and stagnate our economy.

So? What do we do? First, we need to get money out of our politics. Make sure our politicians are answering to us the people, not the top 1%. Until that happens, there will be very little movement to real change. Ban super PACs and lobbying. Have choice-ranked voting and publicly funded campaigns.