
Pretty slow year in politics, huh? Ha! Got you, sucka. The 2016 presidential race has felt more like a crazed, national midlife crisis playing out as mom (Hillary) and dad (ugh) drive us to the land of lesser evils. The differences are stark, and anyone who thinks it’s a tough decision is simply being difficult for the sake of extorting attention. But the sentient Fanta bottle in a cotton-candy toupee should be credited for making us think about how to improve our country. With the 240th anniversary of our nation’s independence looming, we decided to come up with a list of 101 ways to make the home of the brave great again, assuming it ever was great. Depends who you ask. Have a happy Fourth of July, and remember: the founding fathers would be horribly ashamed of all of us.
- Don’t build a wall.
- Free municipal WiFi across the country—or at least make San Jose’s Wickedly Fast Wi-Fi live up to its name for once.
- Put an expiration date on debt.
- Stop saying San Francisco is part of Silicon Valley.
- Bring back vowels—looking at you startups and DJs.
- Quit blaming Mexico for our drug problem.
- Stop wishing rape on rapists.
- Require climate change deniers to carry insurance to pay for all damages if they’re wrong.
- Ban fracking.
- Create Get-Out-of-Jail-FREE cards for misdemeanors.
- Stop listening to Malcolm Gladwell.
- Make Puerto Rico a state, and perhaps drop Florida.
- Decriminalize homelessness.
- Exempt Malala from the Natural Born Citizens clause to elect her as president.
- End Citizens United.
- Something about Glass-Steagall.
- Make it harder to buy a gun than rent an apartment.
- Create actual tenant protections in Silicon Valley.
- Joe Biden is automatically invited to every birthday party.
- Either make the primary for every state the same day, or get rid of primaries altogether.
- Or at least get rid of superdelegates.
- Vaccinate everyone.
- Legalize and regulate all drugs.
- Teach kids about cigarettes by having one Sesame Street character a year die of lung cancer.
- Destigmatize addiction and send drug offenders to rehab, not jail.
- Record all drone strikes and make the videos public.
- Give Assemblywoman Nora Campos (D-San Jose) her own reality show—for everyone else’s safety.
- Force San Jose Mayor Sam Liccardo to close his mouth in pictures.
- Create a Hunger Games for Fox News on-air “talent,” minus Shepherd Smith. He can host.
- Abolish all bathroom bills.
- Redo the “Brexit” vote and require anyone who celebrated Britain’s “Independence Day” to spend a month in a jail cell with Will Smith. And Jaden.
- Make Sarah Palin the poet laureate for the Ozarks.
- Drop interest on student loans.
- Enact universal free healthcare.
- Bring back the income tax structure of 1950.
- Raise the federal minimum wage to $15.
- Declare a moratorium on the word “artisanal.”
- Create a grade school course about respecting women and bodies.
- Serve nutrient-packed “superfoods” in school cafeterias.
- Require all U.S. citizens to visit at least one other country before they’re 30.
- Make VTA light rail faster than backpedaling.
- Ban the term “hoverboard” until we get real fucking hoverboards.
- Don Draper took the train to work every day. Don Draper was a badass. Let’s take the train, or the bus, or bike, or walk at least once a week.
- Offer tax credits to offset all smart car costs.
- One-way car sharing service for every city with more than 100,000 people.
- Every new home should operate on gray water system and solar power.
- Acknowledge that the Founding Fathers only got it half right.
- Leave Social Security alone.
- Ban all pharmaceutical TV ads.
- Get rid of baseball’s designated hitter.
- Pay college athletes a salary; pay pro athletes less.
- Bar public funding for pro sports stadiums.
- Teach all Americans that football is the proper name for soccer.
- Force the NFL to release all information about concussions and brain disease caused by American football, which we’ll now call Brainball.
- Stop with the exorbitant charges for reclaimed furniture—it’s just old.
- Forbid hipster companies from pairing two seemingly non-related words with an ampersand. (i.e. Soulpatch & Douche)
- Free Ke$ha.
- No more Batman movies for 10 years.
- Fuck Marvel.
- Admit that Terminator 2 special effects still stand up remarkably well.
- No more pushbutton DJs.
- Never forget that musician Greg Kihn played a Trump rally after all this is over.
- Teach Prince’s music in schools.
- Quietly discuss whether we were wrong about Bieber.
- Run PSAs to stop helicopter parenting.
- Bring guitar music back to the masses.
- Stop saying hip-hop used to be better back in the day … even if it was.
- Require Segway riders to use the freeway.
- Stop clapping for comedians who make bad jokes.
- Place Kevin Hart in a safety deposit box and be done with him.
- More pneumatic tubes. They’re cool, right?
- Force TED talks to go underground, as speakers will be hunted.
- Nix Judd Apatow, keep Paul Rudd.
- Give Sean Penn a Pulitzer for his El Chapo reporting while maintaining a serious face.
- Guillotine all man buns.
- Require everyone to take 10 deep breaths before posting on social media.
- Take activism offline and show up in person.
- Stop praising Macklemore for calling out the very privilege he continues to enjoy.
- Eat more ethnic food.
- Require all businesses to run an ad a month in their local free alt-weekly newspaper to support independent, public-spirited journalism.
- Legalize sex work and regulate it as a legitimate industry.
- Take all religion and prayer out of government.
- Give Jesse Williams a bigger microphone.
- New counterterrorism strategy: deflower heaven’s virgins—consensually—before the suicide bombers get there.
- Require taxi drivers to know the streets, turn off their mobile phones and not complain about short airport rides.
- Stop publishing the names of mass killers and refer to them instead as Coward or Douchebag.
- Prohibit Wu-Tang and other hip-hop artists from selling exclusive copies of their records—especially to AIDS drug price gougers, securities fraudsters or combinations of both.
- Staple an H-1B visa to the diploma of every U.S.-educated foreign national.
- Phase out Prop. 13 property tax disparities.
- Declare a moratorium on farmland conversion.
- Ban housing construction on any hillside visible from the valley floor.
- Expand attorney-client privilege so that discussions between public officials and publicly-paid attorneys can’t be concealed from the public.
- Rewrite Google’s algorithm to rank small businesses over venture-funded disrupters for popular commerce-related search terms.
- Outlaw those little white styrofoam packing pellets.
- Ensure that an 8-ounce cup of coffee never costs more than a gallon of gas.
- Require patent and copyright trolls to live under bridges.
- Retire the terms “stakeholders,” “reach out” and “monetize.”
- Allow Elon Musk to make clean, safe water available for pennies a month for everyone, eliminating the need for water districts.
- Make ComiCon a paid holiday.
- FDR died in his fourth term. Let’s give Obama a third.
- Just dance.
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