What if Trump were gone?

I’m an optimist at heart, but this past year even I have wavered. As frustrated as I was under the Bush presidency, I never dreamed a president like Trump could exist anywhere but in a developing country that repressed its people through dictatorship or oligarchy. Like many Americans, I was proud to live in a country that—despite its capitalistic mentality and self-serving diplomacy—offered the world many examples of leadership, strength and a resolve to help others, gladly offering a hard-working immigrant the opportunity to succeed.

But now it’s 2018, and the world moves forward even as we wonder how we’ll survive another year of Trump and a Republican Congress that has forgotten the meaning of fiscal sobriety and compassionate conservatism at every turn. Over the past week, in the spirit of the New Year, I asked family, friends and random people I encountered what they wished our government would accomplish.

The immediate answer from many was ridding ourselves of President Trump, either through impeachment or resignation. When I pointed out that would likely give us President Pence, hardly a paragon of progressive values, each was adamant that even Pence would be preferable to an unbalanced narcissist whose lies and misbehavior are simultaneously destroying our country’s reputation in the world and our self-regard.

People easily generated a list of policy items for their government to tackle, including comprehensive immigration reform, passage of a clean DREAM Act, and addressing climate change. One person, echoing pre-Trump America, wished for universal pre-K to help every child enter school prepared to learn.

My wish for 2018 is that Congress would stop dithering and help people get health care. Now that they’re finished making the rich richer, the very first thing Congress must do is reauthorize funding for CHIP and the Community Health Centers.

CHIP is the health insurance program for nine million children who live in working families who are nevertheless poor. The Community Health Centers are clinics that serve everyone in need, regardless of income or documented status. According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, if the funding isn’t renewed, about 2,800 clinics will shut their doors, and millions of people will lose access to health care.

In Reno, these clinics are operated by Northern Nevada HOPES and the Community Health Alliance, two organizations full of compassionate and committed health professionals, led by CEOs who could easily take their talents to the for-profit sector and double their salaries but prefer to spend their time designing creative health care solutions, knowing their heroic efforts literally mean life or death to struggling people in our community.

I’m not one to quote President Ronald Reagan, having grown up under his budget cuts that devastated California’s world-class higher education system because he didn’t believe in “subsidizing intellectual curiosity,” but since Republicans treat his legacy as saintly, it’s worth repeating the most famous passage from his farewell address to the nation: “I’ve spoken of the Shining City all my political life. In my mind it was a tall, proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, windswept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace; a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity. And if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here. That’s how I saw it, and see it still.”

It’s heartbreaking that in just one year, we’ve travelled so far backward from Reagan’s vision. His Shining City is now smothered in a darkness of lies and deception, selfishness and greed. May 2018 be the year when the people demand the return of America’s beacon.