As I watched the flag-draped coffin of the late Billy Evans, the second Capital Police officer to lie in state, descend from the Capital steps, I wept – and wondered how much longer we would find ourselves living in a country that has become so violent.

As I saw the photograph of the deceased Duane Wright holding his one-year old child and heard the wails of his aggrieved aunt, I also wondered how much longer we will go on living in such a violent country.

As I heard witness after witness in the trial of Derek Chauvin, charged with killing George Floyd, I asked myself again: How much longer must we live with the massacre of black people, mostly men, by aggressive, out of control, incipiently violent police?

And when I read David Gray’s stunning Facebook post I wondered again how much longer such hideous racist behavior would prevail?

Gray’s post was about his day, one in which he would take all manner of precautions to ensure that he, his wife and his child would make it through another day without being shot by police. He would, he said, not take public transport. He would not hang an air freshener in his car, and he would double check his car registration status. He would be sure his license plates were visible, he would carefully follow all traffic rules, keep the radio down, forgo stopping at a fast food restaurant, forego prayer, and simply hope to God that his car didn’t break down.

His wife would take another set of precautions when she picked their young child up from daycare. They would not play in a park or go for an ice cream. Once the child was in bed, neither of his parents would leave the house to run errands or jog. “We will just sit and try not to breathe and not to sleep,” Gray wrote. And in everything he and his wife would do or not do, there was a name attached: Lt. Caron Nazario, Philandro Castro, Sandra Bland, Rev. Clementa Pickney, Elijah McCain, Tamir Rice, Ahmaud Argery, Breonna Taylor, and many more because of what had happened to each one of them.

But it isn’t only police violence that makes the burning question linger in my brain and bruise my heart. How much longer, I ask myself over and over again, must we live with so much violence that results in the massacre of the innocents?

Several days before I wrote this commentary a woman in Virginia was killed by a stray bullet. The same day eight people were also wounded by gunfire in a separate shooting, and a mother of six was fatally wounded in North Carolina while on an anniversary trip with her husband, shot in the head in a drive-by shooting in an act of road rage.

How can it be that we live in a country so barbaric that you take your chances just going grocery shopping, attending school, showing up at work, being on vacation, having a night out for drinks or dinner, or standing in your own backyard? How much longer can we live like that?

How did we become a banana republic in which our own house of parliament could be stormed by insurrectionists calling for the death of elected officials and a state congresswoman could get arrested for gently knocking on the governor’s door as he welcomed Jim Crow home? How did we reach the point where Asian Americans are beaten on the streets of America and trans kids are denied health care?

Gun violence is not only a physical threat. It’s a public health emergency that threatens our emotional well-being and fills us with anxiety. Some of us get emotionally crazy. I actually ask my adult children to text me when they get home from being on the road, walking in the dark, jogging in the park, or working late at night.

According to the Gun Violence Archive as reported by the Washington Post, in 2020, gun violence killed nearly 20,000 Americans, more than any other year in at least two decades. The U.S. experienced the highest one-year increase in homicides since it began keeping records last year, and large cities saw a 30 percent spike in gun violence. Gunshot injuries also rose dramatically, to nearly 40,000.

This year, following the January 6th attack on the Capital, over two million guns were sold in January alone. That’s an 80 percent increase in gun sales and the third highest monthly total on record. All of this while the outdated Second Amendment is invoked in the 21st century, hundreds of years since muskets went out fashion and military weapons became vogue.

Writer Mary McCarthy once said, “In violence, we forget who we are.” America, it seems to me, need not remember who we are so much; that would reveal the “400 year lie” that current writers admonish us to remember. Instead, America desperately needs to think about what we have become. Only then can the country heal, reinvent itself, and emerge from the darkness that is rapidly enveloping us. Let us begin with a question: How do we stop the massacre of the innocents?

“How Far Should Biden Go?” a recent piece in The Atlantic asked. The answer, in my opinion, is as far as he and his administration can over the next several years, keeping in mind all that’s on their plate. Atlantic staff writer James Fallow rightly underscored the need for prioritization and triage in planning, quoting the head of Jimmy Carter’s transition team James Watson: “You have to separate what must be done, soon, from all the other things you might want to do later in the administration.”

I’d like to see a number of issues tackled once the Biden administration has dealt with Fallow’s suggested priorities including “reversing the corrosion of the executive branch,” and instituting investigations into the horribly mismanaged Covid crisis, along with border policies that resulted in children being ripped from their parents, and the “negligent destruction of the norms of government, especially “the electoral process.”

It’s the norms of government that concern me most because many of those norms have resided in trusted tradition rather than codified law. That needs to end. Laws must be written that ensure we never reach another breaking point in our democracy.

The electoral process tops the list. As activist Joan Mandle says in a blog, “The lifeblood of our democracy is under threat from big private money in politics. Cynicism about politics and government is rampant.” The Citizen’s United decision by the Supreme Court allowing corporations to spend unlimited amounts of money on campaigns added to that cynicism along with a 2014 a Court decision that raised the limit of individual contributions to parties and candidates to a staggering $3 million, suggesting that “the Supreme Court has declared war on campaign finance reform”.

Pro-democracy movements have struggled to change the way election campaigns are financed in the U.S. for years. One model they look to is the UK’s financing of campaigns. http://www.loc.gov/law/help/campaign-finance/uk.php Since 1883 UK legislation has existed that prevents excessive spending by electoral candidates. Their system regulates campaign financing by focusing on limiting political parties’ expenditures and transparent reporting of donations received and election expenditures.

The Electoral College is another piece of the electoral process that needs revisiting. In short, it needs to be abolished. Designed to keep both small and large states happy in determining who became president, it also reflected racist and misogynist ideologies. Most importantly, it is arguably anti-democratic. We’ve lost two presidents who won the popular vote, Al Gore and Hillary Clinton, making a mockery of the “one man [sic], one vote” theory. Perhaps more alarming is the fact that Donald Trump lost the popular vote by nearly three million votes, yet he won the Electoral College by 74 votes and became president. According to the Brookings Institute, a majority of Americans have long opposed the College. This may be in part because income inequality and geographical disparities across states could mean the College over-represents the views of a small number of people because of its structure, as Brookings Vice President Darrell West points out.

Several other reforms are called for, including term limits for both Congress and the Supreme Court. Proponents of Congressional term limits argue that restricting the time a representative or senator may serve would prevent politicians from amassing too much power, thus become out of touch with their constituents. Never was this more apparent than in the 116th Congress. (Opponents argue that elections are the way to limit terms but without campaign finance reform that is questionable.)

Advocates for term limits on the Supreme Court argue that the Court has become highly politicized along party lines, making a 5-4 or 6-3 Court dangerously partisan. A multitude of social justice and human rights decisions made by ideologues with lifetime appointments can spell disaster for key issues such as healthcare, reproductive rights, voting and civil rights, and more. Some analysts suggest well-defined 18-year terms as a way of restoring limits to what they call “the least accountable branch of government.” In September 2020 Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) introduced a bill establishing staggered 18-year terms for SCOTUS justices.

Presidential pardon power must also be checked. While that power can offer mercy, it has been abused, never more so than by Donald Trump. As Princeton professor Keith Whittington notes, “Future abuses could be remedied through a constitutional amendment that makes explicit a president cannot pardon himself, takes pardons of immediate family members off the table, requires that pardons be issues only after conviction, or that pardons cannot be issued during the lame-duck period after presidential election and before president-elect has been inaugurated.”

Finally, a series of codified laws, which have existed since 2000 B.C.E., the most famous example being the Code of Hammurabi written in 1700 B.C.E., which codified the belief in “an eye for an eye” https://study.com/academy/lesson/codified-law-definition-lesson.html, must replace our trust in tradition if democracy is to prevail and remain sustainable. As the last four years have demonstrated, bipartisan legislation is clearly required and urgently needed.

It’s a tall order, I know, but as James Fallows noted, there is a “never-ending mission of forming a more perfect union.” The time to begin that daunting mission is now.

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Elayne Clift writes about politics, women, and social justice from Saxtons River, Vt.