OPINION BY THE AMATEUR JOURNALIST
When Senator Sanders announced he was going run for president, I was all Ready For Hillary. I was also ready for a long and boring process for my first presidential election. Then I actually heard Bernie speak for the first time. He spoke about things that I’d never really heard any politician talk about at any length. The way he presented his case was just different. I couldn’t explain why or how at the time.
Fast forward to late May, my dad brought me to my first political rally. The energy was that of a concert where this was everyone’s all-time favorite band. They chanted, they did the wave, there was only standing room left when we got there half an hour early. That rally changed the way that I viewed politics, it changed the reality of the world that I lived in. Suddenly I was really excited about the race, I wanted to be smarter, to be more educated, just so that I could help make sure that this man was elected.
In comes The Political Revolution
It took me months before I realized what the heck Bernie was talking about.
“A political revolution? Okay yeah. Oh you mean I have to be involved with politics? Oh……… okay then. I’ll try.”
What does that mean? Well, it simply means that as a country we have got to get more involved in the political process. We cannot be represented in a government when we don’t vote in their elections. With an abysmally low voter turn-out rate, this country is headed even deeper into the helpless, special-interest-controlled oligarchy. Sanders makes this point incredibly well and it’s finally starting to pay off.
Introducing: Sanders Democrats – The Next Generation of Progress
Now, I refrain from using the term “progressives” because as we Bernie supporters have seen recently is that even people who wear the label “progressive” (probably) take money from special interests and refuse to acknowledge that they’ve sold out their title to become part of the establishment. You’ve got anywhere from Howard Dean attacking Sanders on his Medicare-For-All plan, who now works for a healthcare lobby firm, to Gloria Steinem implying that young women only support Bernie because “they want to be around the boys..” – A notion I find offensive and completely sexist, something I wouldn’t expect from such a well-known “feminist.” Not to mention the blatant (as I like to call it) red-washing of Bernie Sanders and his people by Hillary Clinton and her campaign. From the false narrative of the “Bernie Bro” to the flat-out republican move of implying Bernie will take away all your health care while also raising everyone’s taxes. What they fail to mention is that instead of paying thousands of dollars in medical bills + insurance the average family would save thousands with Bernie’s Medicare-for-all plan.
We also know just how committed Bernie’s movement is to their cause. Don’t believe me? Try 28,000 people in Portland in August 2015, the year before the election, or 3 million individual contributions, marches across the country, or raising $20 million in January 2016.
My whole point in highlighting these characteristics is that they show a passion that if guided properly can become something truly revolutionary. Today I want to introduce you to the people who have taken Bernie’s message quite literally (as we all should) and are actually running for office to fight for the issues that they believe actually matter. This list of 144 folks across 37 states (I won’t introduce them ALL but you can view the list here) should scare the establishment. Educated and aware people who have the ability to run and have an affect are everywhere. The more we encourage these people to keep believing they can make a difference, the more likely we will be able to enact change. These people are trail-blazers, paving the way for people like myself to run in the future. They are ‘Sanders Democrats’. They believe in things like minimum wage, challenging Wall Street banks and political corruption, taking on Monsanto, stopping the TPP, debt-free college, and probably all together add up to a progressive wing that may even be more progressive than Bernie Sanders. If you didn’t think Bernie could get things done, I’d re-think that right now.
We aren’t just talking about a group of citizens to help rally fellow citizens together to tell politicians to hear us and represent our views. We’re talking about a group of citizens that are becoming those said politicians. This is essentially the political revolution that Bernie has been calling for. Millions of Americans have to stand up and say enough is enough. Hundreds and thousands of Americans need to stand up and run for office is not said explicitly but it needs to be. This leads me to my next point: electing Bernie Sanders is the only way to achieve campaign finance reform because he is actually proving that you can have a successful campaign without sacrificing your morality to beg for money from big business.
One of the biggest issues that I hear about why people don’t run for office is because they “don’t think they could do it without turning into a bad person.” Which is actually something I said myself, something my father told me when I was 7, when I asked why he didn’t run for president. This is something that up until Bernie Sanders, we all didn’t think was possible. This is something that has slowly but surely been cementing the fact that we as a country have no representation in government anymore. The elite has been telling us to sit back, we got this, and it’s too hard for you. All while making sure the education system gets more useless and our resources like welfare, unemployment and health insurance are all slowly taken away. Then 9/11 happened and they stripped us of our rights and told us it’s for our safety. The decline in standard of living for the 99% was on purpose, to make sure we were too busy making ends meet to care about politics so that the rich could get richer and everyone else could get poorer. This struggled was forced on us and weighed us down. Eventually we have situations like a 47% illiteracy rate in cities like Detroit, where NAFTA (Thanks Bill Clinton) ended up destroying the once great “Motor City”, and we wonder why our citizens are so hopeless/unaware when it comes to politics. We all see you Detroit, we just never knew how to help.
The enthusiasm of Bernie’s supporters is more significant than I think most people realize. What happens when people are excited about something? They’re a hell of a lot more likely to follow through, that’s for sure. That fact in its self is something unique when it comes to voting. A lot of the main stream media pundits will ask, “Bernie excites young voters, but will they turn out?” But when they fail to see is that my generation has grown up in a world that is constantly at war. We’ve grown up in a country that has the Patriot Act. We never thought our vote mattered because it never did in our life. Bernie excites us because he isn’t the “lesser of two evils.” He’s actually a candidate that we can wholeheartedly endorse, with no hesitation or doubt. That’s the difference. Bernie is showing us that it is possible to run without becoming corrupt, without ever in his career having to compromise his moral code, excites us in a way the pundits just don’t get. This means change is possible because it’s already happening. I’ve always told myself, “If you can do it once, you can do it again.” When you show someone that something is possible, there is no longer anything in the way of letting them go full-force into making it happen again.
This enthusiasm will motivate an entire generation of politicians that knows for a fact they can do it without sacrificing their lives, without having to turn the other cheek to fund their campaign. All they have to do is go to the people. If your case is possible, the people will be the thing that gets it done. Bernie proved that as Mayor of Burlington, Vermont. Bernie single-handedly knocked on thousands of doors after phoning his brother Larry and telling him “I think I can win.” Bernie put together a coalition of working and middle class people to help him win his election. This is Bernie’s thing and it is finally resonating with the masses.
We all have a responsibility to get involved, but until we reform campaign finance, until we begin to address all the problems we have, we can’t expect everyone to be able to get involved. That’s why it’s up to the privileged, the people with the means and the ability to be aware and do something about. When we come together, we can not only make changes to how things are now, but change the culture in which we live in, like Bernie, to help breed a new generation of progress that will live on beyond us and continue to help advance our society. I accept my responsibility… do you?
Contact William Curley @ mailliwcurley@gmail.com