#ThisMachineKillsFascists
To begin with, Bernie Sanders is completely inline with every single one of my policy views, save a slight deviation on gun control (largely owing to regional and thus experiential variation). However, this is profoundly deeper than that - it speaks directly to the core of who I am as a person and why I am Here with a capital H.
When I was a kid, my father once said, "when you borrow something, you must return it in at least as good a shape as you found it." I obviously hadn't done so, hence the talking-to. I later crossed that with something Robert F. Kennedy said in an interview with Sir David Frost in 1968, the year Kennedy was assassinated. He was asked, “How would you want your obituary to read?”
He replied, "Something about the fact that I made some contribution to either my country, or those who were less well off.” Kennedy said, "I think back to what Camus wrote about the fact that perhaps this world is a world in which children suffer, but we can lessen the number of suffering children, and if you do not do this, then who will do this? I'd like to feel that I'd done something to lessen that suffering.”
So we must remember that we borrow this world from the next generation, and it is our obligation to give it to them in better shape than it was given to us. That is why I am here and it is readily apparent, in both word and deed, that it is why Senator Bernie Sanders is here as well.
Like Tom Joad in the immortal words of John Steinbeck and so beautifully recounted by our own Woody Guthrie, wherever there's a face to be fed, or a newborn cries in anguish, there you'll find me. Wherever men and women aren't free, and wherever a policeman beats an Occupier, or a family gets evicted unjustly, I will be there. Wherever someone fights for a place to stand or decent job or a helping hand, wherever someone is struggling to be free, there you will find me.
And there too, you will see Bernie. The young college student fighting housing segregation. The mayor of Burlington literally taking out the trash and rebuilding his city. He announced for President in a park that he made happen for all of the people of Burlington, not just wealthy condo buyers. The congressman who spoke out loudly against anti-gay slurs on the floor of House when hardly anyone else would. He stood against harmful intervention in Nicaragua, against both Iraq wars and the PATRIOT Act. He stood against business interests fleecing the public. He fought for and won important improvements to the Department of Veterans Affairs that literally saved lives. In the Senate he continued, never wavering from his commitment to We The People.
Government Of the People, By the People, For the People will not perish from this earth, thanks to the movement he is building. His message is "we", not "I" and "not me, us". You will also almost never hear him speak in the first person, because he understands that it is all about Us, Together. An America Together that stands loudly and clearly for Justice and Dignity For All.
He clearly understands deeply, and always has, how completely interconnected the issues that affect us are. It is immediately evident that he, as do I, views the political arena as a giant three dimensional web, where moving one of the intersection lines alters the entire web in both dramatic and subtle ways that affect our lives. He demonstrated a mastery of that way of thinking and working, earning him the title of "Amendment King". In tinkering around the edges even when he disliked the larger bills, he affected real, meaningful change for people who desperately needed it. And, in so doing, he racked up a greater record of accomplishment than did his primary opponent who proclaims that she is the one who can "get things done".
And now, too, he fights against injustice in a time when too few will. He has consistently, for decades, fought against the five kinds of violence perpetrated against the people, but especially against people of color: physical violence, political violence, legal violence, economic violence, and environmental violence. I have never seen a politician understand and describe that so clearly.
At a time when we are seeing unprecedented levels of Islamophobia, even being promoted by a leading presidential candidate, it is immediately obvious that Bernie Sanders lives the message described in Dr. Hatem Bazian's profound "Islamophobia and the Three Evils of Society" - those being, as laid about by the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr: racism, materialism, militarism. When I attended Dr. Bazian's lecture at the Muslim Community Network, the connection between their two messages was so deep and resonant that I literally had to wipe away tears and resist the urge to jump up and cheer in the middle of it. Holy crap, I'm still getting worked up over it four days later, especially on the day of the Brussels attacks.
He is literally bringing an entire generation of people, young people who are more interconnected, thanks largely to the rise of the Internet, social media, and the now ever present mobile devices, than their parents could possibly imagine. They (and I as an early adopter) don't watch the news, they create it, they share it, and they alter the discourse through extremely small-d democratic movements like Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter.
They are the future I predicted in high school when I described the Internet as having the potential to become the greatest tool for the promotion of freedom and democracy the world has ever known. And they are turning on and turning out, in record numbers. They are joining their county Democratic committees. They are running for local office. There are even a few running for Congress. This is the Political Revolution in progress remaking the Democratic Party into a hybrid of FDR's New Deal and Obama's Open Data movement, with a powerful emphasis on participatory democracy. They, and by extension we, are literally remaking and modernizing the Marketplace of Ideas in a way that no one could even imagine just ten years ago, before the first iPhone was introduced.
I simply cannot sufficiently describe how profoundly transformative this campaign, this movement, this Political Revolution is. I look at what he, and we, are doing and I see what I've dreamed about all my life since I became politically aware as a kid: we are leaving the world a better place than we found it, in all that we do.
These words don't even begin to describe how much that means to me.
