Give Yourself Permission

Democrats desperately want to defeat Donald Trump.  They'd like to get things back to how they were before Hillary Clinton lost to him.  Conventional wisdom within the upper echelons of the party dictates that what is needed for this job is a conventional dem.  Résumé ready, brimming with policy proposals, as comfortable in a roomful of Silicon Valley billionaires as seated before the members of the New York Times editorial board.  A celebrity cab drivers would line up to have a beer with, with a name that easily escapes the mouths of our nation's most esteemed pundits while provoking nothing more dyspeptic than a knowingly cynical smirk.  Intersection with an approved identity not a disqualification. Pete Buttigieg would represent the standard notion but in a new package that is young, gay and military.  Amy Klobuchar has the concept down and is an excitingly alternative gender. But if the voters are not exactly turned on by either of those newish faces, Joe Biden should work.

Bernie Sanders is categorically different.  The comfort in his own skin comes from a constitution that is driven to restore America from its billionaire and corporate owners back to its people where it has always belonged.  Healthier now though he is than he was before he started this time last year thanks to a heart procedure that cleared his bloodstream, it is still valid to ask whether it wouldn't be more reasonable to ask of him nothing more taxing than the benefit of his wisdom and guidance from the safety of the less stressful sidelines.  But who would he advise? Who is as committed as Bernie Sanders to the type of fundamental change that is urgently needed to turn this country and this planet around from the free way that capitalism has had with it for nearly 40 years?  Few voters have as crystal clear a vision of the disease of capitalism that plagues this country and the world.

Bernie's revolution starts with specific policy proposals.  Medicare for All-- no qualifications.  Free Public College for All.  Cancelling Student Debt. Transforming the economy through the Green New Deal and reducing carbon emissions to slow down and who knows maybe someday reverse the effects of man made climate change.  Cancelling trade deals that are designed only to pad the profits of tax-shirking corporations while exploiting labor in other countries, meanwhile decimating the distribution of American wealth.  Reform of an immigration policy that is designed to keep a steady supply of immigrant workers whose undocumented status makes them vulnerable to low pay and outrageous abuse and exploitation from unscrupulous employers (many of whom pour money back into the political system to keep paths to legal immigration as prohibitive to would be refugees as they currently are).  Decriminalizing poverty-- reforming our justice system so that it is more just and less systematically brutal on selective populations. Getting capitalism out of government.  Getting Billionaires and Corporations to give back some of their obscenely excessive share of the world's pie to begin to address the mess their unfettered greed has made for all of us.  Getting money out of politics.  Seeing to it that things fundamentally change for the leeches in the uppermost percentages of the 1%, because this is the only way it can fundamentally change for the better for all of us (including the leeches).

No one could credibly claim it's absolutely impossible for Joe Biden to win in November against Donald Trump.  Anything is possible.  The Financial Crisis that devastated the middle and lower classes was a deliberate crime against America that caused real misery and harm, and yet nobody who caused it lost a dime, nobody was prosecuted for it and many who were behind it were recruited to the administration that was elected to handle it. Thanks to a decision of the highest deliberative body of the land, corporations are considered to have as much freedom to participate in the political process as people and their money is considered a legitimate form of speech.  We blithely accept a mercilessly profit seeking layer called "health insurance" chosen for those of us lucky enough to be employed by employers who are legally under no obligation to grant us this benefit and who offer us this layer of their choosing that sits between ourselves and those we seek health care from as though this is a perfectly normal and not at all insane way for a people to procure care for their health.  Billions of dollars a year are transacted to bring you panels of the most highly educated, sanitized experts on politics on our cable news channels and in the pages of our most influential newspapers and magazines who are always wrong. All of these pundits will tell you what Bernie Sanders stands for is an impossible pipe dream.

Bernie Sanders is fond of quoting Nelson Mandela's observation that a thing "always seems impossible until it is done."  Give yourself permission to believe in a better future of a specific nature: A future in which much much more of the 90% of wealth and income concentrated among the 1% of the county finds its way into the lives of ordinary poor and working class Americans and their families.  A beautiful future of people happily educated to whatever level suits their fancies and helps them meet their dreams, a people who have no fear of sudden illness ruining their finances and their lives, a people whose lives are powered by abundant clean energy, who breathe clean air, drink clean water, travel in clean cars and high speed trains, who live in peace with their neighbors and whose country lives at peace with the world.    Permit yourself to vote for change.  You will be joined, polls show, by a groundswell of people who would not vote any other way.  This is how Donald Trump gets beaten.  Be part of it.