This is no time to be mired in the past. This is not your grandpa's election, not your pa's, not even your last. This one is different. This one's not about democrat vs republican or left vs right, this is about up or down, the 1% vs the 99. This is the working class vs the ruling elite. This is about class war, the one the 1% have mercilessly waged against the working class for lo these many decades and centuries, and which they have in recent years taken to new extremes to the detriment of everything we care about: justice, freedom, democracy, the general welfare and sane, humane, well-reasoned government policy.
This is about doing the right thing vs doing the same thing.
Our situation has never been so dire. With climate change already ravaging the planet and the world sliding crazily toward world war III, we are in a tough spot.
What's wrong with us has never been clearer (greed), what to do about much of it has never seemed more straightforward and we've never had a candidate like Bernie Sanders whose history and overall being embodies precisely the thinking, personal qualities and clarity of vision we need at this moment. We've never had a chance at hope and change like this one. That it comes at this critical time when it is most needed, seems a serendipitous confluence of history of a very rare kind. I won't suggest that stars were aligned, but it's as if.
Suddenly the whole world begins to get what Bernie's been ranting about all these years.
Sadly, people often change slower than their environment. History is full of such stories. The Mayans lived on corn even as their agricultural processes slowly ravaged their land causing droughts and massive crop failure leading to social upheaval, starvation and the collapse of their civilization, they kept planting corn because that was what they did. Even when it no longer worked for them, that's what they did.
That is no doubt a vast oversimplification of some incredibly complex history, but the point remains: being too slow to adapt to change can kill you. We are dealing with that kind of social inertia and those kinds of dire consequences with regard to climate change, war as business, archaic and ossified feudal systems posing as democracies, etc.
We are too often guilty of fighting the last battle, running the last race, missing the boat by aiming backward. Assuming yesterday's truths are today's and tomorrow's. Seeing yesterday's world out the back door. Living in the present wrapped in notions from the past.
We too often too tightly close off our hearts and minds to the present, the future, the possibility and promise of something new.
And cling to the devil we know.
Cheating ourselves of the change we desire and so desperately need.
We survive by adapting but we sometimes adapt too slowly out of an excess of caution and socio-political inertia, a tendency to think rigidly so as to keep the train on the tracks and the ever popular failure of vision or imagination. This is why we require bold leadership, because people are too often not very bold, in thought or action. This is both understandable and a considerable hindrance – especially given the system the 1% have designed and arranged to serve exclusively themselves.
To overcome it, we all have to share in the epiphany at the heart of the Bernie movement and the political revolution: that we face a future that is in many ways daunting and uninviting but if we do all the right things now, we might still make it as a species, we might still have a fighting chance – but not if we leave greedy corporations in charge. We all see what they have done. The handwriting is on the wall for those fuckers. They've done nothing but wreck the place.
They deserve to have zero influence. Zero.
We must rise in great numbers to fight the entire system or none of what could happen will. Failure is not an option. I'm not saying we can't fail, we might, look at the forces arrayed against us, look at how hard it is to arouse people to fight back. I'm just saying we can't afford to.
One way or another, this primary will mark a turning point in history.
I think climate change is the big win with Bernie, but a more reasonable, humane and just society makes for some tasty gravy. Some mighty tasty gravy indeed. I've been dreaming of it all my life.
This is about undoing the oligarchy, returning control of the government to the people, the country's rightful owners and getting our policies in line with the best interests of the American people and the general welfare. This is about no longer being the helpless victims of a corporate-owned government, as we have so long been, but about standing up to enforce our right to be the government, the way it was once upon a time envisioned. This is about government of, by and for the people and never letting it vanish from the face of this precious earth.
Government of, by and for corporations and rich greedy fucks has fucked us all but good. It's time to turn the hose of democracy on those assholes.
We need people at the helm who care about much more important things than profits. Profits are simply not what matters most now. The American people are the rightful owners of the government, not those assholes who have purchased it from those who never owned it to sell in the first place, and we're coming to take it back for the love of all humanity. The profiteers have made a horrible mess of the planet and society, top to bottom, and we're here to fix all of that. Not serve it. Not cash their checks.
Not to participate in the evil but to fight it. And to change it. Before it seals our fate.