* This is a Bernie Sanders diary.
We have been so brow beaten and demoralized by decades of corruption, perfidy, malfeasance and incompetence in our 'leaders' that many of us have given up all hope of ever changing anything.
We can't have peace or universal health care or prison reform or fairness. We can't do anything about homelessness, poverty, racism, the Military Industrial Complex, big money in politics, price gouging in medicine, Wall Street thievery or any of the many other maladies that plague us. We are powerless because of republicans or gerrymandering or 60 votes or conservatives or red states or whatever.
With entrenched and powerful special interests zealously guarding the status quo, we will find changing anything a hard dollar as long as we continue to lie down and let them roll over us on every issue that matters. God didn't create these problems and curse us with them. These are all man made problems.
“The problems we face did not come down from the heavens. They are made, they are made by bad human decisions, and good human decisions can change them.”
Bernie Sanders
I often hear people proclaiming what ‘the reality is.’ As if they know a secret I don't know – that nothing is possible.
The reality is man will never fly, we'll never put a man on the moon, a black person will never be president, and no one will ever want to waste their time on computers or the Internet.
"I think there is a world market for maybe five computers." -- Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, 1943
"But what...is it good for?" -- Engineer at the Advanced Computing Systems Division of IBM, 1968, commenting on the microchip
"There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home." -- Ken Olson, president, chairman and founder of Digital Equipment Corp., 1977
"Who the hell wants to hear actors talk?" -- H. M. Warner, Warner Brothers, 1927
"We don't like their sound, and guitar music is on the way out." -- Decca Recording Co. rejecting the Beatles, 1962
“The internet is just a fad” ~ Newsweek, Feb. 26, 1995
People can be spectacularly wrong when they lack vision or daring. People have a strong tendency toward defeatism and self-limited thinking. Few have ever accomplished anything of note without first overcoming the nay-saying and negativity of their peers. Artists, inventors and visionaries who succeed, do so in large part by learning to ignore their critics and all their family, friends and colleagues who tell them it can't be done. No one will ever write a great novel, paint a great painting or overcome enough obstacles, natural or man made, to achieve anything extraordinary.
People are often quite static, unimaginative and hopeless in their thinking, as though nothing ever changes, as though nothing is possible.
What can be more palpably absurd than the prospect held out of locomotives traveling twice as fast as stagecoaches?
The Quarterly Review, March, 1825
Hence, if it requires, say, a thousand years to fit for easy flight a bird which started with rudimentary wings, or ten thousand for one which started with no wings at all and had to sprout them ab initio, it might be assumed thatthe flying machine which will really fly might be evolved by the combined and continuous efforts of mathematicians and mechanicians in from one million to ten million years--provided, of course, we can meanwhile eliminate such little drawbacks and embarrassments as the existing relation between weight and strength in inorganic materials. [Emphasis added.]
The New York Times, Oct 9, 1903, p. 6.
That the automobile has practically reached the limit of its development is suggested by the fact that during the past year no improvements of a radical nature have been introduced.
Scientific American, January 2, 1909.
Many people are convinced that nothing spectacularly good, wonderful or amazing can ever be achieved.
When JFK declared that we were going to the moon in 1962, people laughed. Even a lot of people at NASA were skeptical. A mere seven years and a couple of million problems solved later, Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon.
In your face, unbelievers!
JFK understood visionary leadership. Think big, aim high, proclaim your goal and then figure out how to get there. You don't figure out how and then proclaim your goal based on what seems doable. You go big, commit to the goal and then figure it out. You don't limit yourself to safe goals. You don't think small. You don't dwell on all the reasons why it can't be done. You commit and then figure it out.
We can't change the nature or political make up of Congress. We can never have single-payer universal health care, we can't do anything about war, wealth inequality, etc, etc, etc.
We can never make an obscure Jewish socialist grandfather from Vermont with radically hopeful ideas our president. And even if we do, we can never elect enough people to congress who will support his initiatives.
Yes we can. But we have to quit thinking like we're already defeated. Sports teams don't calculate the odds and then choose to play a game or not based on predictions or probabilities. They know you can only win by trying. You can only win if you're in the game. You commit, then figure it out.
'We'll never transition to 100% renewable energy, we'll starve, it can't be done.'
Bernie knows, like JFK knew, that first you commit to a worthy goal and then you figure out how to get there. Not the other way around.
You never know what you can do until you try. Reality has a way of surprising and rewarding persistence, confidence and vision.
'But Americans hate socialism!'
Americans have been conditioned to hate socialism, yes - precisely because it's bad for billionaires but good for ordinary people. The brainwashing has been intense. The typical American knee-jerk reaction to the word 'socialism' usually bears no relation to that person's understanding of the term. Many Americans have a blind hatred of the word socialism without understanding it in the least, but many Americans are sick to death of the ravages of unbridled capitalism and when they hear Bernie's ideas they love them. That's why people turn up by the thousands to hear him. Not because he's a democratic socialist (no doubt the mildest form of socialism) but for the brilliance and desirability of his ideas, the profound nature of his personal commitment and the clarity of his vision. The power of his ideas is overcoming a century of pro-capitalist, anti-socialist brainwashing. People aren't so afraid of the word socialism anymore. People want answers not excuses, solutions not bullshit.
Bernie makes sense and gives people hope. That's something we could all use. Along with universal health care as a human right, free public education for all, and justice and fairness for all Americans.
We can do this. This is nothing compared to going to the moon.