Louisiana wants a brand new era of leaders who’re competent and dedicated with character and compassion. We have to spend money on electing extra younger folks, girls, racial and ethnic minorities and LGBT candidates who will really concentrate on fixing issues.
The upset victory this month of Davante Lewis for Public Service Fee, towards an 18-year incumbent, exhibits what can occur when youth and enthusiasm demand efficient responses to issues like local weather change.
With first-time candidates operating for workplace, there’s a new power and a brand new accountability for individuals who consider in higher schooling, higher paying jobs and strengthening households and neighborhoods to scale back crime — and the insurance policies to perform these targets.
We’d like secure neighborhoods, secure streets and secure communities the place households and companies can thrive. Louisiana has too many youngsters dwelling in poverty situations, too many weapons on the streets and too few alternatives.
We have to spend money on households and communities to encourage literacy, success at school, financial self-sufficiency and private accountability, so folks can get higher paying jobs, ample inexpensive housing and entry to inexpensive well being care.
If we’re ever going to maneuver from the underside of each unhealthy listing, we have to spend money on all of our residents.
Louisiana has too many politicians who’re old-school hogs on the trough, catering to enterprise and political events that sow division. They need to take away the rights of ladies, disinvest in communities and serve cruelty as an alternative of compassion.
We’d like leaders who will put all households first, concentrate on bettering the well being, schooling and security of youngsters and make our neighborhoods, colleges and communities secure for households.
We’d like the grandmothers, moms, daughters, aunts of Louisiana to face up, converse up and present as much as demand accountability and a brand new imaginative and prescient of households first in Louisiana.
We’d like disrupters, innovators, leaders who don’t cater to the best way it has at all times been accomplished, who don’t cater to the “outdated White guys within the smoke-filled rooms” however who need to transfer Louisiana into the twenty first century.
However first, we have to belief girls to make their very own well being care choices and management their our bodies and reproductive well being. We have to get the politicians out of the bed room and the medical doctors’ workplaces.
Louisiana will do higher when ladies and men are equal residents who obtain equal pay and respect. For too lengthy, highly effective enterprise pursuits defend themselves and keep the established order.
Let’s put households first for a change. There are too many individuals who need to flip again the clock and preserve girls barefoot and pregnant and subservient, who need to push the LGBT neighborhood again within the closet, who don’t need to acknowledge or reward the skills of everybody no matter race.
The ladies of Louisiana are usually not going again. We’re marching onward right into a brighter future for our households and that’s why voting issues a lot: The outcomes of elections matter.
Melissa S. Flournoy is board chair of 10,000 Girls Louisiana.