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| PAUL
GLOVER ESSAYS: community
control of food, fuel, housing, health care,
planning, education, finance. |
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Feel
the Bern
and Pour on the Heat Paul Glover * May
2016
Some of your family
and friends, and even some Bernie fans, will increasingly pressure you
to support Hillary Clinton. They'll expect you to abandon the
considerable political leverage the Sanders campaign has created.
They'll ask you to transfer your vote to her, without reward.
Bernie himself would be discarding his 55-year demand for deep change, and alienating those who demand change with him, were he to endorse a candidate who has defied what we have worked for. Cautious liberals who want mild reform without risk or inconvenience will argue that Trump is too crazy, too racist, too sexist, too dangerous. They will warn of his thugs, walls, deportations, and insults. So if you reply that both Hillary and Trump would serve a murderous military, big banks, big corporations, labor exploitation, the prison industry, fracking and other environmental destruction, they will call you a purist. If you explain that Trump and Hillary will begin to sound increasingly like one another, appealing to one another's voters, you'll be called uninformed. If you claim that Hillary is basically a liberal Republican and Trump a conservative Democrat, you'll be dismissed. |
If you remind them
that polls show Bernie beating Trump better than Hillary, and that
polls show Bernie more trusted than Hillary, they'll say that it's time
for a woman president. If you say it's more important we have a
president whose policies benefit women, they'll be annoyed. If you persist, saying that Bernie's political revolution goes to sleep whenever a centrist Democrat is elected, and that Trump appears less aggressive than Hillary on war and globalization, and that both candidates would be relatively isolated by Congress, you'll be called unrealistic. Then If you let them know you'll vote for a third party candidate sooner than an establishment candidate, they'll call you a spoiler. But you can't spoil something that's rotten. Finally, if you declare that you're committing your life to building a healthy society that serves all people and honors all species, and that you'll risk your convenience to advance this, and that you're more excited to create beauty than to consume stuff, that you're more interested in sharing than owning, and that you'll live simply so that the planet can revive, you'll be called too idealistic. But when you embrace Bernie as a model for your life, even more than as a candidate, you'll provide America with new definitions of success and practicality, exactly when we need these. Glover is founder of a dozen organizations and campaigns dedicated to ecology and social justice. paulglover.org |
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