2016 Postmortem

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(85,996 posts) Tue Jul 14, 2015, 01:17 PM Jul 2015

Bernie Sanders: 'My Life is My Life'

It was the late 1950s, and Sanders was still a teenager, running to be class president at James Madison High School in Brooklyn, New York. His platform promised to raise scholarship money for kids in Korea orphaned during the recent war. “It was an unusual thing for a person so young to be involved in,” remembers Larry Sanders, Bernie’s older brother. When the votes were tallied, the future Senator from Vermont fell short and lost, but the outcome set a precedent he would love to repeat on the national stage. The winner adopted the Korean scholarship idea and made it happen...

Sanders’ education in socialism began at home, in a three-and-a-half room apartment in Flatbush, Brooklyn. His father was a paint salesman from Poland and a high school dropout, and the family lived paycheck-to-paycheck. When Sanders’ father went with his wife to see the play The Death of a Salesman, his father so identified with the underemployed Willy Loman that he broke down in tears. “The lack of money caused stress in my family and fights between my mother and father,” Sanders explained to TIME in an interview this month. “That is a reality I have never forgotten: today, there are many millions of families who are living under the circumstances that we lived under.”

Bernie’s older brother, Larry, was a student at Brooklyn College who would come home and discuss Marx and Freud with the high school kid. They talked about democracy in ancient Greece, and Larry took the young Bernie to local Democratic Party meetings. Bernie followed his older brother to Brooklyn College, but when his mother died unexpectedly young, he left Brooklyn and transferred to the University of Chicago.

In Chicago, Sanders threw himself into activism—civil rights, economic justice, volunteering, organizing. “I received more of an education off campus than I did in the classroom,” Sanders says. By his 23rd birthday, Sanders had worked for a meatpackers union, marched for civil rights in Washington D.C., joined the university socialists and been arrested at a civil rights demonstration. He delivered jeremiads to young crowds. The police called him an outside agitator, Sanders said. He was a sloppy student, and the dean asked him to take a year off. He inspired his classmates. “He knows how to talk to people now,” said Robin Kaufman, a student who knew Sanders in 1960s Chicago, “and he knew how to do it then.” He was a radical before it was cool.

read more: http://time.com/3896500/bernie-sanders-vermont-campaign-radical/

Growing up in the Midwood section of Brooklyn, Sanders lived in a rent-controlled building on East 26th Street. He attended P.S. 197 and later Madison, according to the report on NY1.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg also attended that school.

His older brother Larry, now living in Britain, said Roosevelt and Hitler had a profound effect on them. “Jewish boys growing up in that time couldn’t but be aware just how important politics is,” Larry Sanders was quoted as saying. “It’s a matter of life and death.”

“I’m proud to be Jewish,” Sanders told reporters, adding that as a child, being Jewish and growing up to parents who survived the Holocaust taught him “in a very deep way what politics is about.”

“A guy named Adolf Hitler won an election in 1932,” he said. “He won an election, and 50 million people died as a result of that election in World War II, including 6 million Jews. So what I learned as a little kid is that politics is, in fact, very important.”

read more: http://jpupdates.com/2015/07/12/brother-roosevelt-hitler-had-profound-effect-on-bernie-sanders-political-life/

Mr. Sanders speaking during a sit-in he led in 1962 at the University of Chicago to protest discriminatory housing policies.

When he arrived at the University of Chicago in 1961, he was a product of his “solidly lower-middle-class” upbringing in a poor Jewish family stuffed in a three-and-one-half room apartment in Flatbush. His father, Eli, was an immigrant from Poland who arrived in the U.S. in 1917, penniless, and without an education or the ability to speak English. None of his relatives who stayed behind survived the Holocaust. He sold paint to scrape together a living to support his wife, Dorothy, the daughter of Polish immigrants, and their two sons, Larry and Bernie. The alarmingly tight finances made a lifelong impression on Bernie, who told a reporter for the New York Times that his father reminded him of Willy Loman of Death of a Salesman.

He graduated from Brooklyn’s P.S. 197 and James Madison High School* where he was captain of his high school track team. He enrolled at Brooklyn College, but then transferred to the U. of C., where he financed his education with a mix of part-time jobs, grants, and loans.

While his parents voted for Democrats, they were not, Sanders has said, involved in politics. His mother died young, at 46, during Bernie’s year at Brooklyn College, and, brokenhearted—his mother’s unfulfilled dream was that the family would move out of the apartment to a house—he headed to Hyde Park.

It was there that he has traced his attraction to lefty politics “When I went to the University of Chicago, I began to understand the futility of liberalism,” he told a reporter for the Los Angeles Times in 1991. On campus, he joined the Young People’s Socialist League, he became active in the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), he was an organizer for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and he organized and led a sit-in protest in 1962 against university-owned, racially segregated campus housing. He has admitted to being a middling student at U. of C., reading Marx and Freud on his own while investing lightly in preparing for classes and taking tests. He took an overnight bus to DC—his first time there—to participate in the 1963 March on Washington, and witnessed, via loudspeakers on the Mall, Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech.

read more: http://www.chicagomag.com/Chicago-Magazine/Felsenthal-Files/May-2015/Bernie-Sanders-University-of-Chicago/

Todd Lockwood, a Burlington-based author/photographer/musician, remembers sipping coffee at Leunig's Bistro one morning in 1987 when he came up with the idea of recording then-mayor Sanders at his White Crow Audio studios.

On a whim, he called the mayor’s office — he didn’t know Sanders — and left a message with a secretary. Before long, he got a call back — Sanders wanted a meeting.

Sanders gave Lockwood a list of songs, mostly from Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger, he would be willing to record.

Lockwood, a Sanders supporter, said his personal favorite is, "This Land is Your Land." And while acknowledging the strangeness of the whole saga, he believes Sanders should be proud of his brief musical career.

“Part of it seems a little preachy now, but I think it's a pretty cool project,” Lockwood said. “I don’t see any reason why he would be embarrassed to have it out there. When you listen to what he’s saying, a lot of the message is exactly what he’s saying now — the one percenter stuff. Its been in his repertoire for a long time.”

read more: http://www.sevendaysvt.com/OffMessage/archives/2014/09/17/bernie-sanders-recorded-a-folk-album-no-punchline-required