A Wee Bit of Political Pondering…

I know for a fact that a certain percentage of  Bernie Believers were never Democrats and had no interest in becoming one. These are the folks who merely registered as DEMs so they could vote for him, but they have no intention of remaining DEMS. And that’s fine! (Hello, there! Read on if you’re among them. This is a safe place to be!)

 

But too many of these people really, really, really want to see the two-party system destroyed–or at least the two parties we have right now. And maybe that’s fine, too. As a concept.

 

Then there are the anarchists who want… well, what they want is as varied as they are. So I’ll leave that right there.

 

But there are those of us who have been life-long Democrats–maybe not down-the-line-every-single-time Democrats (we’ve spotted scoundrels in our own ranks, too, from time to time). And we’re staying put this time because TRUMP and because we see the potential–thanks to Bernie Believers–to redeem our party and bring it back to the better angels of its nature; that is, a party that reflects the needs, desires and goals not of oligarchs, plutocrats and corporations but you and me and Uncle Jim and Aunt Sarah, and every other person who works for a living.

 

So it’s hard, maybe, for non-DEMS to understand where we’re coming from. It might seem we’re reneging on our commitment to be stalwart Bernie Believers (which a great many of us remain even as we vote for Clinton), but from our prespective, we clearly see what Bernie is trying to do: redeem this party, the one he knows can be redeemed with the right amount of pressure put behind the efforts.

 

I can see why and how the federal government has earned its black eye among people born after 1980. They’ve never had a federal government that has served them. The government has gone increasingly off the rails and the disastrous Citizens United has exacerbated the condition to a breaking point. Moneyed people have been buying it since the Reagan era. And Watergate put us all off our feed for a generation: we decided all politicians who lasted must be corrupt and into payola for policies.

 

Of course that’s ludicrous. The fact that HRC makes a lot of money for speeches is because she is represented by a speakers bureau whose going prices start at (OMG!) hundreds of thousands of dollars.  Are you aware that Larry the Cable Guy gets the same fees for his appearances?  He does.  He’s in nobody’s pocket, that I know of.

 

So the fact that well-known, well-respected speakers get large sums of money to address audiences is not a “smoking gun.”

 

I’m going here to remind you that a lot of people are voting DEM this time because- well, we’re Democrats, and Republicans certainly didn’t put up anyone who we’d even consider jumping ship to support.  This isn’t rocket science…

 

So  I get it that a lot of non-DEMS are willing to throw out the baby with the bathwater. But understand that a lot of us are doing what we can to redeem the party we used to love: the party that gave us FDR and JFK (and, for me especially, RFK). It also gave us Jimmy Carter–who may not have been one of the nation’s best presidents, but we didn’t go to war during his administration (in only 21 years in our nation’s history have we NOT been at war!)…and he has proven himself to be perhaps the greatest ex-President (so far) in history.

 

Perhaps if you can look at this election from my perspective, you’ll understand and perhaps acknowledge with a degree of respect, why we’re doing what we’re doing: We’re not looking to destroy the party; we’re looking to pressure it to live up to its highest ideals. And it’s looking like we’ve made strides, thanks to Bernie’s candidacy. This year’s DEM platform is the most progressive in its history… so the idea of throwing out the baby with the bathwater is just anathema to us.

 

I hope this explanation serves to calm some of the animosity that has been brewing.   Those of us who have been life-long DEMS don’t want to burn the house down. We just want to put out the fire and bring everybody out safely to live, love and fight another day.

 

Make sense?