So Bernie has endorsed Hillary and now I don't know what to think anymore. Here I was, and so many people were, putting so much hope and faith in Bernie Sanders to reshape this country and to give us all the things we've been dreaming of, and now what? Well first we have to examine the expectations we had of Bernie Sanders. Examining myself, I think I wanted Bernie Sanders to win in part because of laziness. I wanted to be a nominal part of a political revolution that would put him in the White House, and then to sit back and watch the social justice flow in. But that's not the way revolutions work, the Obama presidency has taught us that. Real change will come from continued and concerted effort on the part of all us wannabe revolutionaries, no one can or will just give it to us.
So on the topic of the presidency, what do I do now? Hold my nose and vote for Hillary? She is an astute politician, and there's always hope that she will stand by her grudging concessions to the progressives in the Democratic party, and that she will be more easily moved on other progressive goals. And of course there's her most obvious strength, which is not being Donald Trump.
Here's the thing, I find the idea of voting for her morally repugnant. Not because I find her repugnant, I take all the criticisms of her from right and left with more than a few grains of salt. I figure that anyone who has been a politician as long as she has will surely be involved in more than a few things which look damning when dredged up and filtered through the news and the type of people I follow on Facebook. No I figure she would be a perfectly tolerable president and if the situation in this country were tolerable I would be happy to go back to jaded and apathetic.
But the situation is not tolerable. Me and my generation are drowning in student debt, wars continue to pop up with no end in sight, mass shootings continue to occur with apparently nothing to be done about them but 'thoughts and prayers', black people are being murdered in the street by our police officers; and through it all the 1% continue to enrich themselves while their bought and paid for media corporations and politicians lie to us.
And finally the younger generation was awakened, after years of the older generation bewailing our political apathy. And we had a candidate who stood for us, who gave us hope, and that was Bernie Sanders. The DNC did everything they could to stop him, finally they did, and now we are supposed to just forget? Forget the voter suppression in Arizona, and in New York, the lost ballots in California? Forget and accept that no one in politics gives a damn what the people want unless they can pay for it. Well that's exactly what the DNC, the GOP, and whatever mysterious alphabet entity controls them both (we don't know who they are, but you can bet that they're wealthy) are counting on. They're counting on our despair giving way to apathy, they're counting on our fear of a Trump presidency.
Well I can not in good conscience vote based on fear and despair. I cannot vote for a candidate who got on the ticket through such blatant corruption, and whose strongest campaign platform is being the lesser of two evils. I want to vote based on my beliefs, and neither party gives me that option. So perhaps it is time to vote in someone who is not part of either major party, but who could that be? (hint, it's Jill Stein, more on that later)
