In 1976 at the Republican National Convention, future President Ronald Reagan gave a famous
speech that will serve as the basis for this assignment. Reagan actually had just lost the party’s
nomination for president, and the winner of the nomination, Gerald Ford, unexpectedly asked
Reagan to offer some remarks to the large crowd that had assembled inside an arena in Kansas
City. Reagan apparently had not planned to speak, but he did so in the moment — offering a
powerful message that many say catapulted him to the presidency four years later. Reagan began this speech by noting that someone had given him a writing assignment a few days earlier. Some 44 years later, that assignment now becomes your assignment. Here it is, as given word-for-word in that famous speech (video link available: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_eSmfldz_bA):
“If I could just take a moment—I had an assignment the other day. Someone asked me to
write a letter for time capsule that is going to be opened in Los Angeles a hundred years
from now, on our Tricentennial. It sounded like an easy assignment. They suggested I
write something about the problems and issues of the day. And I said I could do so, riding
down the coast in an automobile, looking at the blue Pacific out on one side and the Santa
Ines Mountains on the other, and I couldn’t help but wonder if was going to be that
beautiful a hundred years from now as it was on that summer day. Then, as I tried to
write—let your own minds turn to that task. You’re going to write for people a hundred
years from now who know all about us. We know nothing about them. We don’t know
what kind of a world they’ll be living in.”
So here are the specifics of your assignment in 2021. Identify two to three of the most important
policy issues facing the United States of America today. For each of these, do the following:
1. Explain the importance of the issue for our society today.
2. Explain what solutions our government could propose for solving any societal problems
connected to this issue. In this section, be clear as to what areas of government are best-suited to solving the issue you raise – such as Congress passing a law, state legislature passing a law, the courts issuing a ruling, a bureaucratic agency issuing a rule or fine, a president issuing an
executive order, etc. (it could be more than one).
3. Explain what a society 100 years from now will think of these issues and the solutions our
society is likely to bring forth—in other words, will these issues still be relevant for them, and
how will our attempts at solving these issues today impact the lives of those who reside in this
country 100 years from now.
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