By Omer Shamil, Opinions Editor
Not to be John Lennon, but imagine a world where we all have the same stab at life. Where people didn’t have to let “life” get to them because they could afford to get sick, send their kids to school and never worry about them going to bed hungry. Where lovers could love freely, without the quiet fear of what tomorrow might take from them. Imagine a world where organizations existed for the betterment of people, not at their expense.
Some people only imagine that world. Others spend their lives sketching its edges. New York State Assemblymember Zohran Mamdani is one of those others. His proposals: rent-stabilized apartments, free childcare, free buses. Sounds radical only if you forget that fairness is radical in a country built to reward the few. To me, they feel like scaffolding: small acts that make breathing room possible.
We all have challenges, and part of life is overcoming them. But what if I told you those challenges are often designed to benefit the few, while the rest of us carry the weight? James Baldwin once wrote, “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” America keeps asking the same people to face the hardest parts of life. About 60% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck. For every ten people you know, your classmates, your neighbors, six of them are one bad month away from losing everything.
Imagine a world where necessities didn’t cost so much, not because they magically became cheaper, but because people mattered more than profit margins. Today, 112 million adults struggle to afford medical care. Nearly a third skip treatment entirely. It’s not an anomaly, it’s a pattern. And the pattern is one we could change if we allowed ourselves to imagine differently.
Wouldn’t you want to wake up in a world where everyone had equal opportunities, where the difference between people’s lives came down to the choices they made, not the circumstances they were born into? Imagine an education system focused on learning, not just grades. One that gave us space to grow, fail, and grow again. I know it sounds idealistic, even unrealistic, and some say these ideas have failed before. But maybe Baldwin was right, progress isn’t unrealistic. It’s uncomfortable for the people who benefit from how things are.
Imagine a life where education wasn’t treated as an “investment,” where people could pursue what they love and live fuller, dignified lives. Where the idea of “bad jobs” didn’t exist because all work carried value not just in money, but in meaning. Policies like rent stabilization, free childcare, and fare-free buses aren’t luxuries. They are small steps toward that kind of life: stable, humane, possible.
And don’t get me wrong, this isn’t about avoiding hard work. It’s about building work that lets people live, not just survive. It’s about a system that values our time, effort, and dignity as much as our productivity. That’s what these so-called “socialist” policies are trying to do: not erase ambition, but ensure ambition isn’t the price of survival.
Still, I can hear the hesitation: the Big S Word. The label makes people shut down before they listen. But maybe the discomfort isn’t with the word. Maybe it’s with what it asks of us: to believe that dignity should be shared, not earned. Bernie Sanders calls democratic socialism the radical idea that everyone deserves a decent life. That’s really all this is: the belief that no one should have to struggle just to exist.
Maybe imagining a better world isn’t naïve. Maybe it’s what keeps us honest. We already live in a kind of shared system. We just tend to share upward, not outward. What if we decided to change that? What if we let fairness be more than a fantasy?
When a candidate rooted in that Imagine-world wins, it doesn’t mean the world is fixed. But it does mean we’ve placed a stake in possibility. Mamdani’s win reminds us. we aren’t just imagining alone. We are imagining together, and maybe that’s what change begins with.
Baldwin once said that nothing can be changed until it is faced. Maybe this is what facing looks like: a vote, a vision, a refusal to stop imagining.
If only it weren’t called the Big S Word.
Citations
Forbes- https://www.forbes.com/advisor/banking/living-paycheck-to-paycheck-statistics-2024/
112 M- https://westhealth.org/news/112-million-americans-struggle-to-afford-healthcare/
30 percent- https://www.cbsnews.com/news/health-care-costs-rising-americans/
This article originally appeared on page 22 of the November 2025 edition of The Gettysburgian’s magazine.
