Tomorrow I'm going to do something I have never done before. I'm going to volunteer to assist in the presidential campaign of Bernie Sanders. I can't think of a task more unattractive than cold calling strangers, reciting a script in order to try to elicit a vote or a monetary donation, or knocking on a stranger's door who more than likely is not political... let alone liberal... and trying to convince them to sign on to a campaign. I'd rather stay at home, take a break from the work week, and do nothing. But this is something I feel I need to do for my own sanity. I'm compelled to do this and I would only let myself down if I didn't act upon this need.
I'm tempted to list all the negative reasons why I'm going to volunteer. There are more than a few. I'm driven in part by a righteous anger and a desperate sense of weakness. I'm driven by disbelief at what I hear on a daily basis. I'm media sick. I'm alone in my sense of outrage. I'm surprised by the misery I'm surrounded by. I'm convinced I know all the answers and everyone else is naïve and willfully ignorant. I'm not really convinced he can win. I will accomplish nothing with this task. I am going to be an un-greased bearing in a small gear on a big old machine that nobody wants to use anyway.
But I'm going to throw all that away. I'm going to go into this thing with an optimistic attitude. So much of the world is dedicated to handing us reasons not to believe in humanity, and as we grow older we keep finding more examples to lose our faith in people. When I was young, I didn't vote. I was a cynical young bacchanalian, riding through life easy and distorted. Life was too big to dedicate to the political world, and I missed a lot of history. But now, I see the political is the personal. Politics is an everyday occurrence, our relationships with each other is political, and we are shaped by the world at large. Imagine if everyone everywhere has woven a small tapestry of our lives, and each tapestry is lain upon each others in a haphazard fashion, strewn in a big pile, each touching others, circling ever upwards, creating a grand pile that stretches into the deep past. We stand now upon that pile of prayer rugs. We are descended from those stories. We are living amongst a long history of decisions that were made for us a long time ago, and the world we see today could have looked much different but for a few rugs being bigger than others.
If I was to come up with a hundred reasons not to volunteer, I could do it easily. But to come up with one really good one is a little trickier. I don't want to say the wrong thing and I want to convince you that I'm right. For every superficial reason I can offer about Bernie's policies and his issue priorities, a counter argument can be made. And no doubt that no one man can change the world for the better (he can for the worse... one man can ruin the world for everyone... John Wilkes Booth proved that much). The fact is I'm inspired by Bernie. I'm inspired because he's calling on all of us to remember the simple fact that the government is ours. People stopped believing that the government was working for us many years ago, and started believing that it was working against us. They aren't wrong. The two political parties have us dancing on strings in a sort of macabre gala. If you step back and look at the parade, you can see that they are no longer concerned with service, they are mixed up in an arms race, a power grab. They are more interested in symbolic gestures and facades than solving real problems. Bernie has been an independent for all of his career because he can see how both parties have forgotten the people. He is the only one of all the candidates with a consistent eye on our needs. It's as simple and complex as that. The time has come for us to stop electing "vetted candidate #456238909" and put people in power with the moral mandate of prioritizing the health of the world, and the health of the people. There's two ways to go this election. We can hire someone who is finally going to work towards lifting everybody up, or we can hire someone who is going to keep doing the same thing we've always done.
I'm open for anything. Contact me.
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