By Father Eugene Hemrick • Catholic News Service • Posted September 20, 2016

The extraordinary level of discord in America leads me to believe the domestic platforms of the Republican and Democratic presidential nominees would benefit immensely by focusing on the quantum leaps we have generated in our lifetime and less on character assassination.

Allow me to enumerate some of the advances in this alternative platform:

A new era is upon us in which electric, solar, wind and nuclear power are catching up with fossil fuel power. Take, for example, the automobile. Great strides have been accomplished in restructuring the automobile. As we have flown around the world on solar power, so too can we drive on it.

Scientific breakthroughs are daily events we must continue to generate, especially in medicine and ecology that keep our life and the earth’s life healthy.

[hotblock]

Paraphrasing Robert Frost’s words, “We have promises to keep, and miles to go before we sleep, and miles to go before we sleep.” Creativity is in the bones of Americans — our imagination yearns to be unleashed like never before.

Inventive machinery reduces manual labor dramatically. We support its ingenuity and encourage its growth, pledging to make every effort to re-educate those in our job-changing times and making them an integral part of our truly “brave new world.” Progress must never come at the expense of the poor.

In some parts of the world, population growth is expanding exponentially. Unfortunately, in many cases, breathing space is becoming compressed. We hold that the more people are able to breathe, the more productive, peaceful and nonviolent they are.

We, therefore, support and encourage the ingenuity of architects and city planners in producing new forms of space that uplift the human spirit, thus reducing a “jammed-together” existence.

The media is a tremendous asset. For it to remain valued, we earnestly recommend it create a practice of examining its ratio of output between the positive and nonviolent to the negative and violent, dignified to undignified productions, that which ennobles the human spirit to that which degrades it and, worse, has the potential of exacerbating mental instability.

A new stage of life has evolved in which the unthinkable is now plausible, unimagined feats are performed and seemingly infinite depths and heights explored.

As great civilizations before us, may our awesome achievements continue to grow and our motto be: “We have promises to keep, and miles to go before we sleep, and miles to go before we sleep.” Positive thinking must be our best means for covering those miles.