Some background information about me..
I am White.
As in Northern European, Scandinavian, blonde, blue eyed white.
Ethnic roots in Scotland, Ireland, and Sweden.
Liberal. College Educated. White.
Poor.
That last line trumps everything else.
I grew up poor.
Poor as in, not having enough to eat poor.
Poor as in washing laundry in the bathtub because I didn’t have 50 cents for a machine poor.
Poor as in believing a minimum wage job was an unreachable dream poor.
Because of poverty, I spent hours in a library because there I could be warm, read and be left alone while trying to forget how hungry I was.
Because of poverty, I lived in places most people would be afraid of driving through in the middle of the day.
Because of poverty I joined the army as a chance of escaping the trap of always being unsure of my next meal, of escaping not knowing what my future would be, of escaping that grinding hopelessness of always never having enough to get by.
I came of age during the Reagan Revolution.
The election of Reagan in the United States had a ripple effect throughout the world. Government after government took up his call to scale back, divest, turn over to the private sector what was traditionally handled by the public sector. Costs were off loaded to the people who were expected to “shop around” for “best deals”. In Canada, this cause was taken up by the Mulroney Government that instituted deep cuts in all areas of Canadian public life, including health, education and welfare.
I felt the first effects while I was in College.
Previously, the government would give grants to students to help off set the costs of tuition and books. These were gone. Then student loans were no longer underwritten by the government and were taken over by banks, which charged “market” rates on interests with demands for payment that impacted credit ratings if not repaid under a set “loan repayment schedule”. Failure to repay meant a hit to your credit rating that affected your later ability to buy a house or take out a future loan.
My army service now meant nothing.
Everything suddenly cost more. Bus fares, electricity rates, rent, food.
I graduated college deep in debt, with no job and a regular repayment schedule of a loan that took precedence over rent, food and living expenses.
In response, I took a number of steps.
My college education was worthless. I enrolled in business school.
I relocated from home to a market that had a higher demand for business school graduates.
I eliminated premiums on my health insurance (another introduction of Reaganism via Mulroney) so I only ever had the most basic care.
I starved.
I worked.
I did without.
In time I improved my lot. I was fortunate. I got a job with a solid company that paid for additional training. I improved my job prospects. I proved myself a good worker. I earned promotions. I got hired from contract to permanent and I started getting health, dental, retirement and savings benefits and I got a raise. I paid off my student loans, moved out of the crummy flat I lived in and got an apartment. I began to earn a real living wage.
30 years later, I work in an industry I do not like but can not leave as it pays the bills. My college education, my military service, my hopes and dreams are distant memories. But I am doing well and I am no longer poor.
To me Reaganism will always be a disease of which the world is still not completely cured. That man is to me the embodiment of a time when the world stopped caring. He infected the planet with greed, hubris, lies, deception and hypocritical justification of theft from those who needed help to enrich those who needed nothing.
To me, Ronald Reagan was a living, breathing example of evil.
Along the way, I became a staunch progressive.
I believed in Revolution.
I believed in Worker control of the means of production.
I believed in people being allowed, without restriction, in living the life they wanted to live that would give them the greatest happiness without causing pain or injury to another.
I became a feminist.
I came believe in “Black Liberation.”
I became an activist.
I became a Socialist.
I still am, to this day, an avowed Democratic Socialist who believes that the best a government can do is to provide the greatest amount of good to the greatest number of people.
Why then, does this white man support the supposed evil oligarch who supposedly sold her soul to Wall Street?
Because I have heard it all before.
I have heard the progressives demand justice and I have seen them abandon it for political convenience. I have heard the promises only to see them broken. I have heard the demands for radical, overnight change only to see these demands sacrificed on the alter of necessity.
Growing up poor teaches you something. You can’t always take at face value the promises of people who want your vote but don’t seem to have a specific path to the justice they are promising.
You can’t always trust those who say they want Revolution to be there when the shooting starts.
The barricades are lonely places, usually manned by those who have nothing, while those with something to lose wait in the rear to see who wins.
You can’t always expect those in whom you put your faith to be worthy of the fight that comes after victory.
I saw it first in the election of Bill Clinton.
He ended Reaganism. He wanted universal health care. He preached that a government’s role was to be the last, best hope of a struggling underclass. He rejected the idea that wealth “trickles down” and argued that instead it is forced up from the bottom. A society that abandons its poor has abandoned its people.
Then, two years later, I watched as the people who claimed to be the most progressive, who claimed to hate Reaganism as much as I did, abandoned him and let the Republicans seize control of Congress for the first time in decades.
I watched over the next painful six years as Bill Clinton, the President who balanced the budget, brought huge economic gains, massive job growth; who enriched the very people who needed it the most; was abandoned by the so-called progressives who placed their demands and wants over the needs of the those who suffered the most under Reaganism. I watched as progressives such as millionaire Michael Moore called him a “Stupid White Man”.
In 2000, I watched as these people abandoned Progress by turning to Ralph Nader and letting George W Bush become President.
The ripple effect occurred again as “The War on Terror” strangled liberty, spread war, paranoia and hate through what once was a liberal, progressive part of the world. I watched as suddenly people had to prove loyalty, torture was now an accepted part of “interrogation” and our every move, key stroke and thought became known, catalogued and registered. Where before, I could travel freely, now I was having to tell a uniformed stranger the reason for my travel, how long I would be staying and when I would be returning, while also giving him my name, address and finger print. I was now suddenly living in a world of “no-fly” lists, black sites, and orange alerts.
Then came Barak Obama.
A ray of sunshine in a very bleak and darkened world. A man of intelligence, character and strength. A man not blinded by ideology or politics. A man who said bluntly “I don’t care where solutions come from so long as they work.” Obama rippled through a world turned upside down by hate and fear leading all people to become the better angels of their nature. For two years, I was alive once again with hope and the promise of change.
I watched as he hammered home the Affordable Care Act against outrageous opposition.
I watched as he took real steps in ending the war of conquest in Iraq and scotched the imperialist ambitions to invade Iran.
I watched as he saved the economies of the United States and the world.
In my home country, strangled by the ghost of Reaganism in the form of Stephan Harper, I could only hope that the ripple effect of Obama would find its way into Canada.
Then, I watched as the same progressives who claimed to care about everything that I cared about abandoned him in 2010 by staying home and not voting.
I watched them do it again on a more massive scale in 2014 when they let the Republicans retake the Senate. This after these same Republicans shut down the government. After Obama brought justice to Osama Bin Laden. After Republican governors and legislators proved that they had learned nothing since 2008.
Soon, Hillary Clinton will win the nomination to be the Democratic choice for President in 2016.
I know when that happens, that those progressives who claim to care about global warming, income inequality, social injustice, wars of expansion and civil and human rights, will likely voice their displeasure by staying home and not voting or by voting but for a third party that means nothing.
And that is why I support Hillary for President, oppose Bernie Sanders and put not a dime’s worth of stock in whatever any progressive tells me is in my best interests or in the best interests in people whose history is similar to mine.
For them, Bernie Sanders is the destination. He is the goal. He is the achievement. He is end.
But that is not the case.
If Bernie Sanders became President, it would only be the start of the journey. President Sanders’ job would only begin at that point with absolutely no guarantee of success. The battles he would have to fight would be legion and the firefights he will wage will be with some of the most entrenched foes any politician would have to face.
I do not believe progressives will be there to carry the water that needed to be carried. I do not believe progressives would fight rear guard battles that would need to be fought. I do not believe that progressives would march, enmass into the polls in 2018 and 2020 to carry the Senate and House as they would need to do to ensure President Sanders had the support he needed to fight the enemies that would array themselves against him.
More importantly, I do not believe, based on what I have seen, heard and experienced, that President Sanders would be capable of fighting, let alone winning those battles.
I do not believe that there would be any global ripple effect from a Sanders’ Presidency any more than there was from a Jimmy Carter Presidency.
My beliefs are based on experience.
Progressives were not there when we, the poor, the oppressed, the suffering, needed them to stop Reagan, to elect Dukakis, to support Bill Clinton, to keep George Bush out of the White House, to elect Democrats to the Congress in 2002, 2004, 2010 and 2014.
The ripple effect of Barack Obama needs to continue. The underclasses, all of us, poor Whites, African-Americans, LGBT, Muslims, and other nameless minorities, need a person who will challenge, compromise, defeat, frustrate, motivate, wheel, deal and use every single tool at her disposal to change the course of not only the United States, but the world as well.
We need Hillary Clinton.
And that is why this white, college educated, male, thanks God that Hillary Rodham Clinton will be the next President of the United States of America.