Why the Bernie Sanders Revolution is Not Televised
Why the Bernie Sanders Revolution is Not Televised
Will Bunch
Posted: 12/17/2015 10:51 pm EST
As a writer, I never expected to fall in love with the 2016 election. As recently as 6 or 7 months ago, I fully expected that America was on a collision course with dueling oligarchic dynasties -- Bush 3 vs. Clinton 2 -- in a race where the (not unimportant) differences would be overshadowed by their similarities, including the fact that Wall Street would be happy with either one in the Oval Office.
Then a gruff, 74-year-old grandfather showed up to change everything. Like a lot of progressive-minded folks, I'd grown more aware in recent years of Sen. Bernie Sanders, and his cast-out-the-money-changers rants against income inequality, corporate greed, and billionaire influence in American politics. But I thought his entrance in the 2016 race was basically a protest move, nothing more. Then came the crowds, and the enthusiasm, which led to more crowds and more enthusiasm, which led to a surge in the polls, especially in New Hampshire and Iowa.
The Sanders surge stirred something within my 56-plus-year-old soul. When I was 9 years old and watched cops assaulting hippies in the streets of Chicago in 1968 -- my first true political memory -- I knew instinctively that I was on the side of the hippies. And I was sure -- in my pre-pre-adolescent naivety -- that someone from this surge of Baby Boomers in the American streets would one day lead this nation into an Age of Aquarius, a new era that would advance civil rights and personal freedom while putting the kibosh on foolish wars like Vietnam. But someday never came. The two Baby Boomer presidents turned out to be a Young Republican Yale cheerleader (Bush 2) and a didn't-inhale, middle-of-the-road triangulator (Clinton 1). The dream went unfulfilled -- until Sanders arrived at the end of his 50-plus year odyssey -- tousled grey hair, slightly stooped, voice grown hoarse.
By this fall, I had to hit to road to see for myself. I traveled to Sanders' rallies in places like Manassas, Va., where his fans had to pass a phalanx of protesters waving Confederate flags, and Boston, where 20,000 supporters filled every inch of a concrete convention hall or waited for him in a dark and frigid park. I went to rural Vermont to find the no-electricity "sugar shack" where Sanders retreated in the mid-1960s, and I went to the very-electric neon lights of the Las Vegas Strip for a climactic face-off against Hillary Clinton, with Bernie's name on the big video screen just as you might find Don Rickles or Wayne Newton. The result is my new e-book, The Bern Identity: A Search for Bernie Sanders and the New American Dream -- an Amazon Kindle Single.
I learned a lot -- some things that surprised me and some things that I'd suspected but needed to see for myself. I went to the Brooklyn neighborhood where Sanders grew up in a cramped, second-story flat off of Kings Highway, and I talked by phone with the candidate's older brother Larry from England, where he's a Green Party activist. Larry Sanders told me his little brother was the kid in grade school who couldn't tell a lie -- even if it got him in trouble. As he grew, it was other people's lies that drove him to activism -- his beloved Dodgers promising to stay in Brooklyn before splitting for L.A., the falsehoods that both Nixon and Kennedy told about U.S. policy toward Cuba and the Third World, and finally the lies from the Nobel laureates who ran the University of Chicago and who claimed, falsely, that university-owned housing wasn't segregated.
I also learned about the remarkable bond between a candidate who never altered his core political values over a half-century, and a new generation of voters who were craving the kind of authenticity that only Sanders -- with a real track record, not an agenda driven by pollsters or focus groups -- could provide. It was a bond that had its more modern roots in the Occupy Wall Street movement, with many veterans of that short-lived 2011 protest -- determined to see real social change and not just make a statement -- getting down with the Sanders campaign, especially after another popular liberal senator, Elizabeth Warren, didn't run. The result was those enormous crowds from Boston to Seattle.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/will-bunch/why-the-bernie-sanders-re_b_8823988.html?ncid=txtlnkusaolp00000592
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