Bernie, We Hardly Knew Ye

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Dear Bernie:

For the record, for what it’s worth, I never thought that you could save the world. That would have been far too heavy a burden to lay on you. But I did think that a government led by you might provide some palliative care as the industrial world continues its inexorable, slow-moving crash. Now it looks like we’re not even going to get that.

And the thing is, man, you almost did it. Four years ago you showed us how an individual candidate could take big money out of presidential politics and run a credible race on small donations. Before you did it, there wasn’t a political person on the planet who thought it was possible. Freed from the constraints of the oligarchs, you advanced policies that actually would have helped ordinary people, at the expense of the morbidly wealthy.

Unlike just about every other candidate for high office that I have ever seen, you did not contort yourself into an image of a winner (I cannot forget Al Gore’s earth-toned suits). It didn’t matter if we played video of a speech you made 40 years ago or yesterday, you were saying the same things. Most politicians can’t get through a day without accidentally telling the truth and having to walk it back.

Most importantly, you offered to take from our backs — the backs of every American alive — the impossibly heavy burden of paying for health care, and health care insurance. As the satirical newspaper The Onion says of gun violence, this is a problem that cannot be solved, says the only country that has it. No other civilized country in the world thinks it’s okay to ruin people financially because they get sick or are injured, with the money extracted from their suffering going to the already morbidly wealthy. 

You scared the hell out of the oligarchs. “You’re a socialist,” they screamed, as they cashed their subsidy checks and dodged their taxes. “How you going to pay for it.” they sneered, in a country with the highest health care costs in the world, a country that never asks what the next endless war is going to cost. 

To tell you the truth, I worried when you started laying more offers on the table. It seemed to me that Medicare for all was a big enough task, and hard enough, that it might have been enough to focus on delivering that one thing. When you added to it the minimum wage,  free college, free child care and the like, you made it easier for them to portray you not as a revolutionary, but as a would-be Santa Claus.  

Never mind. They opened the fire hoses of fake news and inflamed commentary and false advertising in the belief that if they spent enough money they could convince the Democratic primary voters that you were too risky, that what they really wanted was comfort — not a revolution but respite, not sacrifice but reassurance, not a call to action but a return to the couch and reality TV. 

They were right. And that’s where we’re going to be as the seas rise, the forests burn, the storms rage, the pandemic flourishes, the financial system crashes, and the lights go out. I hope by then you’re safe in an undisclosed, secure location in your beloved Vermont. And I hope you are at peace with the knowledge that you could not have prevented it. You just could have made it a little easier.  

Good night, and good luck.

“Bernie Sanders – 20160419-191235” by weaverphoto is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0