Peter Figur America is already great — best place on Earth. Don’t believe me? Move anywhere and tell me you have better access to healthcare, ability to grow economically and across classes, or freedom to choose and expand on your profession.

Our military is the strongest in the world bar none. We develop jet fighters that cost $1T — isn’t that nuts? We have fighter jets built around guns so powerful, if you let them fire for a minute straight it stalls the jet. We have the best special forces and infantry troops and vehicles. We spend more by far than any nation — so if we are weak that means the military is straight up wasting the money — of which the answer isn’t to give them more but restructure the way they spend and probably downsize the organization to streamline efficiency and increase accountability.

Nothing is wrong with investing in America — we agree on that, but civilizations sprung up through specialization and that is what we must do — not every job or industry needs to be in the US. Manufacturing is commoditized, outdated due to technology, and extremely dirty as far as waste by-product. We have gone through a revolution and for those who do not embrace the internet age I am sorry that is what happens when these breakthroughs happen. Again don’t believe me? Look at when all the revolutions happened in history — French, American, British and Chinese — these came about when industrialization hit their countries and the old ways fought against it.

Closing your borders is an outdated concept, it is isolationist and driven by fear. In the 1920s — sure made sense, but we are now a sharing economy and marginalization leads to nothing but disaster. These people aren’t coming here because they want to — they love their home, but there is no way to feed their families, keep their children safe from gangs, etc. American drug consumption fuels a lot of this as we are the “demand” to LATAM’s “supply.” Now do we need to prevent illegal immigration for the sake of infrastructure, programs, and understanding of our own population — yes, here we agree. But we do — have you ever spoken to someone who has gone through the process legally? It takes years and hundreds of pieces of paperwork and documentation. As for those trying to cross illegally; we have reduced that issue (it spiked in I believe 2008), and now we actually are deporting more than we are importing — so this is a non-starter.

Hatred is wrong, and our inability to stop demonizing the other side and have real articulate conversations is the issue in this country and in that we are in full agreement. I would love to hear true debates that leave emotion out and only include fact and logic. So let us have one. I don’t like any candidate that much — they each have their faults, but pieces of what each says have validity. We need to patch together these beliefs rather than toeing party lines.