I’ve been watching the ABC News YouTube video of Sanders’ Washington Circle speech April 13 in NYC. It’s an amazing piece of political oratory made all the more remarkable by the fact that I had been “Berned” just an hour or so prior in watching his appearance on Larry Wilmore’s “The Nightly Show” (the Weds evening episode has not been posted as of this writing, but should be available soon, don’t miss it).
I was prompted to write this post, while watching the NYC speech, by what struck me as a missed opportunity to link seemingly disparate threads of his campaign and political philosophy. Specifically, Sanders bemoans the crumbling nature of US infrastructure—its roads, water systems, dams, bridges and airports, to name just a few, and only later shifts to discussion of the student loan debt crisis and to his advocacy of tuition-free K-16 education—as if that was an issue quite distinct from the need to rebuild US infrastructure. But education and bridges, etc. are all essential components of a nation’s infrastructure: nurturing education builds the intellectual infrastructure, maintaining the physical infrastructure enables/eases the transfer of innovative ideas and practices from ivory tower to main street and from factory floor to corporate offices.
Thus, physical and intellectual infrastructure issues are inextricably linked, why not make that a unified portion of the stump speech/campaign?