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My name is Danielle Cloyde. Thank you for taking the time to meet me. I was born in Houston, Texas, raised in Syracuse, New York then Clayton, Missouri by a single mother. My father's family was from rural Vinita, Oklahoma, and while my parents divorced when I was three, and my father was no longer a part of my life by the time I was five, I visited his family annually. My grandfather lived in an old white house on a large plot of land in the middle of nowhere, presenting a stark contrast to my urban life. He was a living legend in his town, the one you sought out when you needed help. My mom's parents lived in Mattydale, New York, both of whom had served in the second world war, one flying supply planes and the other as an active nurse in London. They were also pillars of their community as volunteers for the local fire department and VFW. Service is a part of my heritage, the idea that we come together and take care of those in need. My grandparents had cast long shadows that created a pathway for me to follow in.

I have stumbled at times, but I have also had help. The path I walk is the only one that makes sense to me, to keep doing the next right thing. For me that means treating others with kindness and compassion. Helping wherever I can, and putting my talents to use for the benefit of as many people as possible. I try my best to help people see the advantages of working together. Showing them how we got to where we are as a society and how we can get to the most optimal future for everyone. I don't think that the success of one person needs to come at the expense of another, that implies that we live in a zero-sum game, and that is just wrong. Together we are more than just simply the raw sum of our parts, because when we get to know each other we start having compassion for each other. Compassion is a commodity that we cannot measure, but we can see the impact of.

What's more, when we let the diversity of our society flourish, and treat everyone with equitable access to education, government and everything in between, we are strengthening our society. The idea is that people from all different backgrounds have different solutions to the problems that we face as a society. The solutions of only one group of people have prevailed for many generations now, and yet the same problems persist. We need new solutions from different groups of people. They simply need the ability (education) and platform to nurture their solution and watch them flourish as they are shared and added to by other people. Not shouted down, but grown.

A necessary component for compassion is mutual respect. When we choose to respect each other, we listen with the goal of understanding and learning. It changes the conversation from a competition to one of collaboration. We take our own pride out of the conversation when we choose to treat each other with respect. Pride gets in the way of learning, it keeps us from being objective and listening with an open mind and from seeing solutions that could potentially benefit everyone.

We are in need of a more compassionate economic model, one where the basic needs of the people are met without predatory profits driving them. Our social safety nets should be robust spring boards to get people back on their feet as quickly as possible. When people are stressed out about basic needs such as shelter, food, healthcare, and education, they are not able to put nearly as much energy into finding or maintaining a job. By de-coupling health care from jobs we give people the ability to grow their skills and freedom to go after other jobs. It also strengthens their bargaining position with their employers. Further, it costs everyone less money overall when we have a single payer healthcare system, while also streamlining the system and paying healthcare workers more. For too long providers have been doing necessary unpaid work while owners of the health insurance companies have been raking in record profits. Our current system is designed to be confusing, inadequate and predatory, leaving people without the care that they desperately need. Healthcare choices should be between providers and their patients, not decided by numbers in a remote office. Too many people have died of completely treatable problems because their care would have eaten into someone's profits. It’s time for profits to take a back seat to compassion.

The problem with how we address issues is that we live in a society that operates in siloed information, that is we think of each problem as being separate from the others. If we are to succeed in our endeavor we will need to take care of addressing all the problems at once. Otherwise we will continue to play “whack-a-mole” and nothing will actually change. This one fact makes the scope of the solution so immense that people are scared to take it on at all. We must though, and I intend to do so here.