The photo atop this story is an aerial view of my old neighborhood. It was taken in 2000, long after my family had moved on up from 6 Mile Road to 9 Mile Road. The area with whitish patches at top-left-of-center is the Charles Terrace Housing Project on the East Side of Detroit, Michigan. Public housing. The Projects. My childhood home.
Our building was already bulldozed by the time of this picture, but even though I haven’t lived in Detroit since the 1970s, I have many clear memories — both bad and good — of growing up there.
White Elementary School, Detroit, MIFor instance, there was the time I was robbed at knife-point. My lunch money was stolen and I went hungry that day. I was a kindergartner at White Elementary School (pictured at right).
And there was my first girlfriend, Carol. She was what’s now known as a cougar — an older woman with a younger man. I was 6. She was 7. We planned to have a half-dozen children, 3 girls and 3 boys, all blond-haired like us. I haven't seen her in decades and she’s now in a wheelchair with Multiple Sclerosis, but I remember her fondly.
It’s partly Carol and her disease that propelled my slow turn away from Hillary Clinton toward Bernie Sanders. You see, Carol is lucky. Her husband is retired from one of the Big 3 auto companies and has excellent retiree health insurance. All of Carol’s medical needs are taken care of and their pension allows them a comfortable lifestyle.
Unfortunately for me and my wife, though, I worked in the technology industry my entire career. Stock options? Busted flat in the Reagan recession and then again in the Dot-Com Bust. Pension? Ha ha. “You don’t need a pension!!! We have a 401K!!!” Health insurance? None. I’m one of the 30 million Americans without it.
You’re likely wondering what Hillary has to do with all this. Well, if you’ll indulge me a bit longer, I’d like to provide a little more background first about me and my wife.
My wife is a wonderful woman. She’s smart, attractive, and despite being raised Republican, managed to find her way over to the Light side of The Force. She actually reminds me of Hillary In many ways.
I remember first seeing Bill and Hillary Clinton in the early 90s when Bill was running for president. “Ah ha,” I thought. “A smart, attractive Democratic couple. They’ll go far.” They were from the South. More or less, since Hillary was actually born in Illinois. But still, he was Governor of Arkansas, and that’s South. And they got my vote. Twice.
EdG — Army StrongAlthough I grew up in Michigan, I knew a bit about the South. I was stationed in Georgia for most of the 3 years I served in the U.S. Army. The Army was my ticket out of the projects. Job training as an electronics technician, 3 squares and a bed. A small chance of Vietnam, but I was 17 when I joined and they didn’t ship you overseas until you were 18. At 17, that seemed a long way off.
It was in Georgia that I first witnessed serious racism. I know it’ll sound trite, but many of my best friends in the Army were either Hispanic or black. There’s pervasive racism in the North, everywhere in the world in fact, but you gotta hand it to the Southern USA — they know how to do it open and often. Or at least they did in the 1970s.
Driving down a back road near Augusta, GA with a few Army buddies. Flames up ahead. As we got closer, we saw it was a wooden cross about 8 to 10 feet high, set alight in front of a tumble-down shack where a black family lived. I suggested stopping to see if anyone needed help. The driver hit the gas and got us out of there, explaining that local Klan members would be hidden in the trees and brush at the edge of the property waiting to shoot anybody that came out of the house or drove into the yard.
Another road trip just outside the base. Stopping at a long, low cinder-block building to pee. Making the mistake of entering through the black-painted door instead of the white door. The black men inside the bar were very nice about it, warning me that the white guys drinking their day away in the “white side” of the building would beat the shit out of me if they saw me fraternizing with blacks.
But, yeah, that was the 1970s. And everyone knows the Clintons are well-liked by blacks nowadays. In fact, Hillary is leading by about 30% in South Carolina, largely due to black voters.
Yet there were things that troubled me about the Clintons during their presidency. NAFTA, which drained away quite a few jobs from black Detroiters and left ravaged neighborhoods like the one in the photo up top. Hillary’s words regarding the crime bill. Super-predators. They had to be “brought to heel”. Like dogs. Chucked into cages. Like animals. Sure, she said, we could try to figure out later what were the underlying causes that led young black men to crime, but for now, out of sight, out of mind is good enough.
Packard Motors Plant, Detroit, MIMaybe I’m silly. Or maybe it’s part of growing up in Detroit and hanging around with robbers and burglars and biker gangs and drug dealers. But I think I know a few things about why people turn to crime: They need money. When the good-paying factory jobs leave town and when Wall Street honors rather than condemns businesses that increase profit through layoffs and outsourcing, people have limited choices. Starvation, the “dole”, or crime.
And being on the dole, i.e. welfare, became a lot harder when the Clintons brought us the end of welfare as we know it.
Life became harder still for a lot of poor, downtrodden people when the 100,000 extra COPS funded by the crime bill justified their jobs by cracking down on drug users and shipping them off to those new-fangled for-profit prisons run by corporations that Wall Street loves to reward for their ability to cage the most human beings possible at the lowest cost possible.
I think I know a thing or two about prisons, too. After all, I’m the only one of the four boys in my family that has never been to prison. I spent a lot of hours visiting my three brothers at the various state prisons and county jails they were locked up in at one time or another.
Fast forward to 2008. A young black man named Barack Obama is running for President of the United States! To be honest, I didn’t think I’d see a black president in my lifetime. Blacks make up only 13% of the U.S. population. There is no way in hell a black man gets elected in this country without attracting a lot of white support.
My wife and I were conflicted. We liked the Clintons. We could picture Hillary as President. But there was Obama, and we could picture him as President, too! We were torn during the early part of the 2008 campaign. Until the dog-whistles started. White people, hard-working white people, we were told, wouldn’t vote for Obama. “He can’t win, Bill,” said Hillary to Bill Richardson. That clinched it for us.
We voted for Barack Obama. Twice.
After winning, President Obama graciously hired Hillary Clinton as his Secretary of State. I’m not going to delve into her record in that position, but suffice it to say that I’m less than impressed at how Libya, Yemen, Syria and Iraq turned out under her watch.
Here we are in 2016. Hillary is running for president again. I’m a good Democrat from a long line of Democrats. I will vote for her if she wins the primary honestly and without interference from superdelegates.
A face that only millions of voters could loveBut I’m supporting Bernie Sanders in the primary. So is my wife. We’re baby boomers, college educated, and although we’ve had a rough few years due to the Bush Recession, there is light at the end of the tunnel and we’re slowly resuming a middle-class lifestyle.
Except when it comes to healthcare.
As I mentioned earlier, I’m one of the 30 million Americans without health insurance. I make too much to qualify for ACA and I make too little to buy my own.
My wife is lucky, if you want to call it that. She has rheumatoid arthritis. She’s in constant pain, has lost several joints to the disease, has to inject herself with expensive anti-RA drugs twice a week, but thanks to President Lyndon B. Johnson, she was able to enroll in Medicare after qualifying for Social Security Disability.
Her medical needs are covered. Mine are not. I still have 5 years to go before I qualify for Medicare. I’m keeping my fingers crossed that I survive that long, that my defective heart valve doesn’t give out completely, that my ulcers and bad knee and damaged vertebrae in my lower back don’t get worse.
That’s one of the many reasons I turned away from Hillary Clinton toward Bernie Sanders. Those magical kittens and flying unicorns and rainbow-colored popcorn affect me and they affect 10s of millions of other Americans.
Tweaking ACA doesn’t do what’s needed to provide healthcare for everyone. Medicare For All does.
Telling Wall Street to cut it out doesn’t end financial shenanigans and systemic risk. Things like Glass-Steagall For The 21st Century do.
Hiring lobbyists and accepting donations doesn’t end for-profit prisons. A vow to end for-profit prisons does.
Going to prison instead of college does not help young people succeed in life. Decriminalizing marijuana and being offered free college does.
[Let me editorialize a bit here: One of the reasons I didn’t go to prison while my brothers did was that I had the GI Bill to draw on for my college education. It changed my life.]
Can Super Bernie™ magically leap tall building in a single bound and single-handedly bring us the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow? No, he can’t, and anyone who claims that is either deluded or is trying to deceive you.
What Bernie will do is try. With our help, at least some of the things he wants are doable in some form. What Hillary wants to do is give up without even trying. That makes me sad. The words “never, ever” should never, ever have entered Democratic Party political discourse. That was the final push toward Bernie, being told by Hillary that Medicare For All will never, ever happen because we’re not even going to try.
I want to try. I’m not a quitter.
This completes my slow turn. Thanks for reading.