Why I’m voting for Bernie
The intercom surprised us during high school chemistry lab. It was about 1:45 p.m. EST. It piped in the radio. This had never been done before. We became silent. President Kennedy had been shot during a motorcade in Dallas, and he had been taken to nearby Parkland Hospital. They didn’t seem to know how serious he had been wounded.
The intercom went off. We went to our seats; our teacher, a gray-haired man with a distinguished moustache and one leg, wheelchaired himself up to his desk in front of the room. He grabbed his crutches behind his desk. Facing us, he pushed himself up and folded his hands in prayer.
"Let us now pray to whomever your God is that the President will be spared," he said.
There was silence. We sat and waited.
The intercom came back on. A new report: The President had been hit in the head. Witnesses had seen two men and a woman running from the Texas School Book Depository.
Seconds turned into minutes when another report flashed. A priest was seen leaving Parkland Hospital where the President had been taken. Apparently he had given the President the last rites. But it was worse. He said the President was dead . . .
Then it was made it official: "President John F. Kennedy, the 36th President of the United States, was pronounced dead today at Parkland Hospital in Dallas, Texas at approximately 1:00 p.m. central standard time."
Our teacher slumped down and started to cry; shortly after, we were dismissed from school.
I got home early and to my surprise found my father there. He had voted for Nixon in the election yet looked shaken. After that I don't recall much of what happened in the next four days except seeing Oswald shot on live TV and the President's coffin being pulled by horses, their hooves clunking down Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington to a funereal beat of military drums.
Our country was never the same after that. In less than two years we were committed to a land war in Southeast Asia. I had entered college away from home, living in the dorms. I had no idea what I was going to do with my life. During my junior year, I took a course with a Franciscan professor. Called “Images of Man,” it was a survey off great works of literature. In the course, Father Stephen as he was known then, presented a compelling justification for the philosophies in works of Plato, Lucretius, Seneca, Nietzsche, Camus, Sartre, and Herman Hesse.
One night I went down to the student lounge to get something from a vending machine. Father Stephen, a man of medium height and build whose head always seemed to be tilted slightly in deep thought, was in the lounge. This was very unusual, and even more unusual was that he looked distraught.
“They killed him,” he said, sounding a bit choked up.
I just looked at him.
“They killed Martin Luther King,” he explained.
Two months later, they also killed Bobby Kennedy. I remember when I first heard about it “McArthur’s Park” was on the radio and the sorrow in that song seemed to capture what I and many Americans felt. It was given expression in the song, Abraham, Martin, and John, released not long after by Dion:
Anybody here seen my old friend Bobby?
Can you tell me where he's gone?
I thought I saw him walkin' up over the hill
With Abraham, Martin, and John
As the Vietnam War blazed out of control, the Animals’ Sky Pilot immortalized its legend:
In the morning they return with tears in their eyes
The stench of death lifts up to the skies
A young soldier so ill, looks at the Sky Pilot
Remembers the words 'Thou shalt not kill'.
You're soldiers of God you must understand
The fate of your country is in your young hands
Sky . . . Pilot . . . . . . . . . . Sky . . . Pilot . . . . . . . . . . .
The next year, a kid from my neighborhood, “Moose” Musco, who had been a Sky Pilot was shot down and killed. It was only days before the end of his deployment. I went to the funeral and met with many of the guys I had grown up with. Afterwards we went to a bar for a night of heavy drinking.
And so it would be . . .
Forty-six years later, a candidate announced for the Presidency, who was running as a Democrat though an Independent. Now a Senator, he once had been a socialist mayor in Burlington, Vermont, near my home. I had heard a bit about him but never paid much attention. Like me, he had been a conscientious objector against war during Vietnam. Many of his views were mine, especially about wealth inequality.
He summarized them in a 1985 speech, and they have largely remained unchanged:
We live in a world where there are several hundred million people starving to death, right now; we live in a world where among the superpowers and other nations of the world, close to one trillion dollars is being spent on weapons, on more nuclear bombs, on sophisticated nerve gases that can wipe people out and paralyze them. And yet, with all the brilliance and all the fine technology, and all the great medical research that they do . . . civilization hasn’t advanced one, bloody iota.
Before long, I realized that Bernie Sanders was someone that I could support with great conviction. In 2016, I campaigned vigorously for him where I lived, a small town on the fringes of Cincinnati, writing a couple Op-eds for the local weekly, holding rallies for him that featured live broadcasts from his campaign headquarters as well as local Democratic Party candidates. Even after he endorsed Hillary, I went to Philadelphia with other Bernie supporters and we stayed in a flat and marched all week with as many as 10,000 others for Progressive causes and in support of Bernie to protest the fraud committed during the primaries.
https://medium.com/@TPCUGRR/where-have-you-gone-bernie-sanders-7d4e173cdf06
Now, here we are again, and Bernie no longer faces a powerful foe like Hillary whose Clinton machine controlled the party. Yet, its influence is still being felt. It has anointed Joe Biden as its standard bearer and has been relentless with its attacks on Bernie with the complicity of the liberal Mainstream Media (MSM), even red-baiting him, which has been the tactic of the Republicans.
In one article, from ABC-News, he was castigated for alleged mixed feelings about gun control in a letter he wrote 30 years ago. Bernie was explaining his opposition to the first Brady Bill, the gun control legislation mandating background checks and banning nine different assault weapons. The report focuses on the letter but doesn’t providing the full context for it, failing to fully explain the Crime Bill which was attached. This bill that was sponsored by Biden expanded the number of crimes for which capital punishment could be used and limited the rights of those on death row. In the Senate, liberals like Ted Kennedy voted against it.
When the law was originally proposed by Senator DeConcini (the law Sanders supported), it was not attached to a Crime bill and was vetoed by President Bush. The Crime Bill had been a concession to the supporters of the NRA.
An even more ridiculous smear is one you can find on many Internet sites. It blasts Sanders for his views on the causes of cancer. This wasn’t yesterday or last year but more than 50 years ago in 1969! Do they have to go back 50 years to find dirt on this man? Is it really that hard to find?
Maybe it is …
That’s why I support Bernie
Nevertheless, they are rigging the system against him once again, putting former Hillary operatives like John Podesta on the Nomination Rules Committee.
Perhaps, even more unsettling: Alex Padilla remains as California’s secretary of state, the person responsible for counting the votes. He has approved use of BMDs, ballot marking devices, which are unverifiable and subject to falsification, in many of the state’s counties. In 2016, he refused to count 2 million Independent votes that would’ve largely gone to Bernie. With all 415 delegates going to the winner of the primary, California is a must-win if Bernie is to capture the nomination on the first ballot.
Problems with the tallies of votes in the primaries have already been evident and there is little reason it won’t continue. First in Iowa, and more recently in South Carolina where Biden’s final tallies far exceeded both exit polls and predictions based on every major poll before the voting, and where BMDs were used.
Now, after Super Tuesday, even more voting irregularities have emerged in Maine (lack of ballots); Texas (insufficient polling places and long wait times); California (voting machine problems); and Massachusetts (suspicious discrepancies (between exit polls vs final tallies). Margin of error should not exceed 4 percent; otherwise, it needs to be investigated for tampering per protocol established by the United Nations. As you can see in the table below, Biden experienced more than a 15 percent boost in his final tally in Massachusetts. No wonder he beat both Bernie and Warren. But it wasn’t the only state experiencing this problem, as can be found in the analysis reported by TDMS Research:
tdmsresearch.com
There’s also talk that the Superdelegates will block Bernie if he has the requisite majority. Given the current corruption, nothing will surprise me.
We can only hope that there is to be a limit to how much they can rig and that our vote will mean something. Otherwise, democracy is doomed.
A vote for Bernie is a vote for freedom; a vote against the corporate kleptocracy and the military-industrial complex; a vote for a living wage and a cleaner environment; a vote for healthcare and a college education for all.
A vote for Bernie is a vote for the people, not the billionaires, a vote that will help ensure that our democracy shall not perish from the earth.