I went to hear Bernie Sanders speak in Albany yesterday. Not because I needed convincing, although for a while I was torn between Bernie and Hillary, not unlike the way I was torn in ’08. It took me longer then; I voted for Hillary in that primary.
But even as I voted, I knew, in the back of my progressive mind and the depths of my feminist heart, that as much as I wanted a woman in the White House, Barack Obama was the real thing.
This year, I caught on faster. Before it all began, I was glad that Hillary was finally going to get to the finish line she’s been running toward for so long. I thought she deserved it, if the presidency can be deserved, and that we deserved her, the most prepared presidential candidate ever.
And then, Bernie.
I felt the Bern long before yesterday, but I went to Albany because I wanted to SEE the Bern, in person not pixels. I wanted to feel the energy around him, and God, it’s great. An old Brooklyn Jew. with the heaviest accent I’ve heard since I left home, is a rock star. Not because of how he looks or sounds, but because of what he says and means.
Bernie says the stranglehold that big corporations have on our country is at the root of everything. And all he has to do is rattle off some key words—Wall Street, fossil fuel companies, insurance companies, big pharma, big food, private prisons—and it resonates.
Those who ‘like’ Bernie but don’t support him, argue that if Obama couldn’t do it, how could Bernie? But Bernie doesn’t think he can; he thinks we can. He thinks we got Cuomo to fight for marriage equality and the $15 minimum wage and against fracking. He thinks New Yorkers (and Vermonters) led the charge, and the rest of the country caught on and caught up.
I see the difference between 2008 and 2016 in terms of changing energy. Eight years have made an enormous difference in our readiness for revolutionary thinking and feeling. Bernie can’t do it without us, and we can’t do it without him. If we’re looking for the leader of the free world, a real leader, one who leads those of us who are listening, to lead the rest of us, we have found him. Yes we can. Now we can.
As for paying for it, Bernie has the right answer. “We are not a poor country; we are the richest country in the history of the world. But trillions of dollars of our wealth is hidden.” (This can only be even more true since the discovery of the Panama Papers.)
In other words, we won’t pay for it. They will pay for it. (There was a time in the recent past when really rich people paid up to 90% of their income in taxes, and no one, not even Bernie, is suggesting anywhere close to that much. )
And speaking of energy … Yesterday, two thousand people on the lines that snaked through central Albany never got in to the Armory, because it was filled to capacity. But Bernie took time to talk to them before coming inside.
Inside and outside, there were Columbia County for Bernie members in the crowd. Gianni Ortiz, Tanya Lee, Rich Volo, Jamie Cashen, John Isaacs, and more. (The CC4B Facebook group now has 374 members and counting, and the new Hudson Women for Bernie group has 114.) I have always believed that Columbia County was an incubator for conscious thinking and living, despite the old boy network, which seems to be doing a stubbornly slow fade-out.
So, we need to lead the charge again, because next Tuesday could be a watershed.
I’m not going to stay home if Hillary is the nominee. Of course I’ll vote for her; it would be suicidal not to. But for now I’m going to stay focused on why I fully support Bernie. It starts with a level of integrity so pervasive and so rarely seen in a politician, but even more so, a vision, that allows him to see the big picture of the present, and a bigger, better picture of the future. An understanding that “real change always comes from the bottom up, not from the top down:”. An awareness that to paint that picture, we need to know what native Americans once knew instinctively—“we are part of nature, not above it”. And last and best, a cogent notion of faith: “We are all connected; when your children hurt, I hurt.”
That to me is the essence of spirituality, and the basis for equality and democracy. If we reduce politics and government to strategy and policy, we’ll never get there.--Enid Futterman
New York Primary, April 19, 2016. VOTE.
(Originally published on imby.com)