Bernie Sanders: What If?

I have met many politicians, but only one ever gave me any "hope" and it wasn't Barack Obama.

Icing The Bern

In the Summer of 2015 hundreds of thousands of U.S. citizens stood in lines that stretched for blocks to get into venues to see a star. The star was not named Swift, or J-Lo or Yo, or Yay, or “Lil” this or that. They were not there to see Michael Jackson and Ralph Northam “moonwalking” in blackface or to see the nine-thousandth regurgitation of Star Wars. They were there to see a 73-year-old politician; and his name is Bernie Sanders. The enormous crowds spanned every demographic that exists in the United States, and I mean every demographic.

The object of their desire was Bernie Sanders, a presidential candidate whom pundits gave no chance of winning the nomination but who touched a nerve in what was otherwise a milquetoast Democratic contest. Many political analysts and even some of his supporters said his chances of winning the Democratic nomination were slim. Polls allegedly suggested that most of his supporters would back a Clinton candidacy if she became the nominee. Did they have some inside information?

These crowds boomed in agreement as Sanders took the stage. He talked about criminal justice reform, not just so-called “police reform” because “reforming” the police is moot if the judiciary, the bail system, and corrections are not reformed. Miranda guarantees “a right to an attorney.” It does not, however, guarantee a right to a competent one.

Senator Sanders spoke on income inequality and immigration replete with proposals to address those issues. He railed against Wall Street greed and laid out his plan to raise the federal minimum wage and make public universities tuition-free. He boldly stated: “This is an economy that is rigged and meant to benefit those on top.” Perhaps that statement, alone, was his political death knell and the source of such supreme confidence he had “no chance of winning the nomination.”

‘Tis funny how that word “rigged” is more democratic than the so-called democracy from which it is resultant. We all know that when Donald “Agent Orange” Trump talks in his sleep he repeats over and over “the election was rigged.” Just this year a victim of a totally “rigged” presidential election in 2000, Al Gore, said of The 2023 United Nations Climate Change Conference or Conference of the Parties of the UNFCCC (more commonly known as COP28) “The world's getting understandably impatient and frustrated that these conferences are rigged.”

Where there is smoke, there is fire and if it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck and tastes like duck…it’s a duck. Peking or otherwise. Of course some of us have known, for centuries, that it is a bullshit and rigged system. From the brim to the dregs and we see evidence of it right at this very moment. Those of us that choose to see. Rigged!

In 2015, Senator Sanders was in Los Angeles and I truly wanted to attend his rally at L.A.’s Memorial Sports Arena, but it was impossible to get tickets to the venue and I was a single parent. However, Bernie Sanders did a regular segment on the Thom Hartmann radio and television program called “Brunch with Bernie” and I had the pleasure of speaking with him on several occasions. He never ducked questions (though I once asked him one on “terrorism” that somewhat confounded him) and there was a genuineness in him that I have never, in my six decades of life, seen in any other politician.

Many forget that humans did not show up speaking, as it were, initially. Though how humans began to speak in what we would consider language remains a hotly debated mystery, the prevailing theory is that human ancestors were unable to control their vocalization at the time when gestures were used to communicate. However, as they slowly began to control their vocalizations, spoken language began to evolve. Gestural language and vocal language depend on similar neural systems.

Gesticulations, countenance, posture and tone tell us much more about each other than the words we speak. As a man with three children, all of whom are women, I have admonished them throughout their lives to “always look at a man’s hands, because his hands will tell you things about him that his words will not. They will tell you if he has ever done any hard work. They will tell you if he is daring and, most of all, they will tell you if he fights.” As humans have evolved, or devolved, we have lost touch (so to speak) with these ancient communicative signals and focused simply on words and images…to our own peril.

Bernie Sanders was not just a bag of hot-air. That is why he touched so many people across every ethnic, age, and gender boundary there is. What people connected with, whether they know it or not, was not just his rhetoric. It was the accompanying primal, non-verbal, signals he emanated that bolstered and gave credence to that rhetoric. In other words, we believed him and he gave us reason to.

Hope and Change My Ass

In 60 years, I have voted twice for a president and both times my guys won. The first time as nothing more than a teenager, but I was an unusual teenager. By the time I was old enough to vote I was about to graduate from college. Resultantly, and given immaturity, I voted Republican because I voted my “interests” at the time. But my “interests” were totally professionally and economically. My guy did not disappoint in the immediate sense as I made more money during his two terms than I knew what to do with. In fact, I worked for one of his appointees. However, in the final analysis, he was one of the worst things ever to happen to the United States.

It would be another three decades before I voted again and my guy won. In that three decades I became quite a different man for maturity and life experience radically changed me. I no longer bought the lie of “America.” I had come to know that it is corrupt, violent, racist and unreliable, I was also a single parent of a young child and had been diagnosed with SLE. I was bankrupted by medical bills and my guy, hue notwithstanding, promised “hope and change.” The only “change” particularly for the people, he supposedly was a reflection of, was a change for the worse. I not only lost “hope,” I revile him because as he so famously stated: “you can put lipstick on a pig, but it’s still a pig.”

Then came a dude that was unlike the other two. He was genuine and I could feel it. It wasn’t just platitudinal, lofty and “soaring” rhetoric it was that primitive communication I previously spoke about. Like Donald Trump (and only in this limited sense) he spoke to his constituents and supporters in a way that was real and plain, that reflected their collective pain.

That is why he was sabotaged.

It is quite true that “hindsight is 20/20 vision.” When I look back, as a Monday morning quarterback, I realize that Bernie Sanders was the only person that could have beat Agent Orange; assuming the elections are legitimate which, clearly, they are not. What the DNC did to Senator Sanders will never be forgiven by this paltry soul. They put ice on the Bern. Why? Certainly it was not because he could not beat Trump. Bernie would have marked my third time voting and I was beyond enthusiastic. However, seeing the vicious machinations from the DNC, I stayed the hell at home with my baby girl. Just like I did in 2020.

Nonetheless, there will be my third and final vote for a presidential election, this year. It will not be for the two-sided, duopolistic, pathetic, race-to-the-bottom candidates. Hell, I might even write in my own name or that of Wilson (my Cojak dog) though I do have a third party candidate in mind. Please don’t approach me with that duopolistic, “you’re just throwing your vote away” bullshit. Because I’m throwing it away anyway if I were to vote for either of the duopoly candidates as nothing will change under them for those that look like me.

Israel will continue to slaughter Palestinians in its ethnic cleansing and genocide of which the United States will remain complicit. The neighboring slaughter and genocide in Yemen, the world’s largest humanitarian disaster, will continue of which the United States will remain complicit. Black People in the United States will continue to be the overwhelming and disproportionate number of “slaves” (legally per the 13th Amendment) in prison. As they will continue to be extrajudicially executed daily by slave patrols per U.S. Police-y. As they will continue to, by far and away, have the most Negative Health Outcomes (NHO’s), the highest illiteracy rates, the lowest familial wealth, the highest infant and maternal mortality rates and everything else fucked up in “America.” Further, if this bullshit was a “democracy” it would, by definition, welcome alternative views and parties as opposed to persecuting them.

So, as I prepare for the death of many things, including my electoral life, I will always muse and wonder about “what if.” What if Bernie Sanders were concluding his second term now? There would have been no Trump, no J.D. Vance, no Kamala Harris (who I can’t stomach and will have a lot more to say about in the days ahead).

What if Bernie Sanders were ending his second term, who would his heir apparent have been? What if Bernie Sanders were in his second term, and even though he is “Jewish” just like I’m Blackish, would Nut-and-Yahoo be butchering Palestinians? Would relations with China be further from the brink of war than they are now? Would there have actually been justice system reform?

Bernie Sanders is 14 months Joe Biden’s senior and still sharp as a goddamned tack. I don’t know the answers to the questions I pose, but I know, in my heart, that things would be different. Bernie Sanders gave the U.S. a chance; a once in a lifetime chance. That train has left the station and the brakes on the locomotive have failed.

But all should be haunted by “what if.”