Better "Pie in the Sky" Than "Rivers of Blood"
I was raised libertarian/anarcho-capitalist (with the deep psychological scars that entails) and declined to engage with the political process until after I got involved in the Occupy Movement. My first time voting in a Presidential election was 2012, knowing if Romney won I would need to emigrate. After two terms of a Centrist Democrat, the stakes are far higher, as conservatives everywhere become increasingly fascist and our societal problems drag on unabated.
You can’t balance Right with Center. You can only balance Right with Left. We need real Leftists in this government, now more than ever, if this nation is going to be at all functional. I’m simply acknowledging that if we’re going to have a government, it needs to do its job. We need it to serve all of us, not just a wealthy few. It needs to serve everyone, not just white people; everyone, not just cishet men. We all have the right to a living wage, to healthcare, housing, education. We need public support for the arts and sciences, and for sustainable infrastructure.
We can do better than this, better than the mess Reagan and his army of fanboys have made of a country that 322 million of us should be sharing as equals. Many other countries have done better than this, yet we’re taught to ridicule them for it.
Bernie Sanders is no Marxist, but he’s more the Progressive we needed Obama to be. A constant barrage of vociferous, baseless criticism from the Right throughout Obama’s Presidency effectively preempted legitimate, constructive criticism from the Left.
Despite an ever-steeper uphill battle against fascism, I think it will be much easier for us to hold Sanders to his promises. He won’t be the only one, as Progressives everywhere are emboldened by Sanders’ campaign. If we keep pushing rather than giving up, we can wrest our resources from the rich and start making this 322 million-person family a lot less dysfunctional.
There are no perfect solutions here. We’re flawed humans living under a flawed system in a flawed world, but that’s why making things better takes effort and dedication… and cooperation, a skill that Americans are brought up to lack. It’s easy to be discouraged because we will need to work on ourselves as well as society– because society is us. The United States of America is not an abstract concept; it’s us, all of us, every last person currently within these borders as well as every citizen currently abroad. We have to do this together and become better people to build a better nation. As much as we clamour for positive change, we’re also afraid of it, because positive change changes us, because the process of it asks us to choose to become better people. We’re not “getting a bunch of free stuff”, we’re asking Sanders to take those tools the wealthy have squandered and let us use them to build a nation that we can all live in– a nation in which we can thrive rather than merely survive at best. Bernie Sanders is not a savior; he’s a facilitator.
With my age and background, I ought to be hopelessly cynical by now, but I’ve been severely depressed since I was about 8 years old. That means if I’m still here, I’m still fighting, so the least I can do is keep trying to help improve all of our lives. That’s why I voted for Bernie Sanders this morning.
Keith Sechrest, non-binary transgender blogger
Austin, Texas 26 February 2016
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