I am soon to be 58 years old. (I had written 59 but my husband just reminded me I am now 57!!) I have been active in Democratic politics since I was 20, have served on my local Democratic committee, campaigned hard for DNC candidates (Bill Clintin, Gore, Kerry, Obama). I attended the counter inaugurals for Bush and my whole family went to the Obama inauguration. In fact, my children were interviewed by the Washington Post. My whole family works hard on social justice issues. I consider myself to be a very good and committed Democrat. The problem is, this party no longer represents the values I hold deeply: about the environment, social justice, incarceration, privatization of resources, big money in politics, what happens to the poor. When Bush was “elected” I took my then young son to the national meeting of the PDA in Washington, DC. He and I listened as people articulated a platform for a progressive agenda, one which seemed reasonable to us.
My husband and I are about to retire. We have both had good jobs and we will have a comfortable retirement. He was trained in the UK (as a physician) and knows well what a single payer system looks like. Both of his parents worked for the NHS as physicians. We are both highly educated. We are white so we do not experience the racial profiling that affects our society. We are not affluent by 1% standards but we are certainly very comfortable. So basically, we are all set. We could turn a blind eye to this election because basically, if HIllary is elected (which would of course be better than the GOP but not a scenario we want to throw our energy and enthusiasm behind), this money in government and the oligarchy this is setting up won’t really affect us too much.
But we have three children, ages 18, 21 and 24. They are in college and grad school and their futures are ahead of them. We did the whole NY529 plan and that ran out the first few year’s of our son’s college, though we had put away the max since he was born. We still use that system, which is capped at 10K a year for the two of us. We pay over $55K a year in tuition, and that is with a reduction I get for being a professor. We have had to take out two second mortgages to put them through college and we still have one to go and grad school and I have to work extra jobs to make sure that is possible. We are lucky to be able to afford this much, but it means we will retire with two second mortgages. We are the affluent putting our kids through college, with assets we can mortgage to pay for it. Many of their highly smart friends are not going on for additional schooling because they are too heavily in debt. Some of them have just and to take lousy jobs because they have debts they will never be able to repay. The system is rigged against their entire generation having a fair society, equal access to resources, good and affordable education, clean water and air, a good environmental policy, a safe world. It is not rhetoric to say that big money has bought our democracy.
I raised these children with the values we hold dear and as they got old enough to see things for themselves, they all realized that the Democratic party did not represent our values. We are far from radical. In fact, we are pretty mainstream. We just believe in fairness, social justice and honesty. These are not ideals. They are what makes society worth living in. We don’t do slick. As my children started to notice this fact about the Democrats, they became more and more disillusioned. One year, my son and I carried a spine puppet in Washington, DC to the DNC headquarters and demanded that they get a spine and stand up for progressive values they always claim, but never endorse. My children, like many others, got tired of supporting huge compromises that they regarded as cowardice. It pushed them either to the margins (or our of the country in the case of our son who works on human rights and refugee issues), but certainly away from the Democratic party.
For the first time in my life, and in theirs, we have a candidate RUNNING AS A DEMOCRAT who we feel is telling the truth, speaking to the values we cherish and not participating in the corruption of money and big finance. We are all enthusiastically endorsing Bernie and working for him. He is not a guest at the table of the DNC. He represents what many of us feel is the true values of the Democratic party.
None of us are BROs. You want us on your team. The energy you are seeing at the Bernie rallies and in the streets is real. It is healthy, and to quote the overused phrase from demonstrations, “This is what democracy looks like.” If the mainstream media does not see it, then they are irrelevant.
Do not call me a Bro. Ever. Do not call my kids Bros. Ever. Or my husband.(Or the farmers I know in central New York who have never voted for a progressive in their lives but are supporting Bernie because they can see an honest broker when they meet one.) Especially not if you expect me to just buy the rhetoric that “well, we are better than Trump or Cruz.” Yes, but so are many other things. I am tired of reaching to accept impossibly low standards for decency and fairness and democracy. I would prefer a peaceful political revolution now at the ballot box than a violent revolution of people we will have left with nothing to lose in the years ahead. The generation of my children has stepped up and demanded democracy and a real future, not more of the same. I stand beside them.
The more Hillary and her campaign decide to disparage this energy and the people who are working for Bernie Sanders as idealists, fools, selfish privileged kids, young people who do not know better, the more the DNC writes its own epitaph:
SQUANDERED THE ENERGY OF A CENTURY.