An open letter to the Bernie Bros.

Nameless One: “Shadow of this life?”

Dhall, Dustman scribe: “Yes, a shadow. You see, Restless One, this life is not real. Your life, my life, they are shadows, flickerings of what life once was. This life is where we end up after we die, and here we remain. Trapped, caged, until we can achieve the True Death.”

Nameless One: “True Death?”

Dhall, Dustman scribe: “True death is non-existence. A state devoid of reason, of passion, of sensation.” [Dhall coughs] “A state of purity.”

Nameless One: Sounds like oblivion, why would anyone would want that? 

~from Planescape Torment

Dear Bernie Bros.

I know a lot of you are upset that Joe Biden came out ahead on Super Tuesday.

I get that. I'm sorry. It happens, I understand that y'all are angry.

And I get that my guy did come out ahead, substantially so, after South Carolina. Do you know why that is? One of the most substantial reasons that Joe Biden is now the Democratic front-runner is because Black voters showed up in droves for him...some of them waited absolutely unreasonable amounts of time to vote for him, too.

Personally, I'm a middle-aged white guy, a former Republican, and I tick a very large number of boxes for what used to be favorable things in Conservatism. Do you know who I voted for in the 2016 Democratic Primary in my state?

Bernie Sanders.

And I didn't get what I wanted, but I voted for Hillary Clinton anyway, because Trump disgusts me and always has. Because I saw him as a threat to this country and many of its people, because duty, honor, and Service Before Self, are not concepts with which I am unfamiliar.

I didn't have to like it. Sometimes you gotta stand and deliver and do what has to be done anyway.

Let me tell you a story.

It was slow at work last night. I work in a casino, it's the middle of the week, and I was in an area that was even more dead. But this customer that I got to know over the holidays and Super Bowl time was there. He was the only person sitting in the dining area all night reading his book and smoking his pipe and I took a few minutes to speak to him as I do when I see him. I went out and emptied his ashtray pretty regular, and wiped the nacho crumbs and stray pipe tobacco bits off his table a few times.

This dude is an elderly African-American gentleman, a Marine Corps Vietnam-era combat veteran and General Motors retiree.

We spoke about books we've each recently read, about health care, about politics a little, and about a shared hatred of war and what is becoming of our nation. When he spoke about being uncomfortable when somebody says "Thank you for your service" I understood as one who is also uncomfortable with this for the same reasons can. We are Americans, not Spartans, not Zulus, and if history has shown us anything it's that freedom and militarism are not compatible. Neither myself nor anyone I ever met served to get thanks from random people who do not know us nor our stories, and who most often do not care. Veterans are people, not objects to be worshiped, with reasons both good and bad, or profound or stupid, for doing what they did.

He said nobody thanked him when he got back from Vietnam. Instead, he was spit on. The one thing I did have to add was to ask, half-rhetorically, half probing a question that was only just developing in my own mind...I asked how many of the young white hippies who spit on him then are the old White conservatives in red hats who want to "Thank him for his service" now?

"Most of 'em" was his immediate reply, delivered with a laugh, but the sort of laugh that tells you it's not really funny. 

This from a dude who has lived in the same city for most of his life. Who had known many of the same people just as long, and who had around the time of the Football post-season pointed out to me that Gerald Ford had once been his Congressman back during the endless political ratfucking of the Nixon era. He said that Gerald Ford never did anything for anybody but Gerald Ford and he still got an aircraft carrier, an airport, a freeway and a museum named after his ass.

This dude hates politics, but of course his race, his life experience, and his previous UAW job meant it is still a part of his life. Yet in the tradition of men of his background and generation he plays his cards close to the chest, saying only "I never voted for no Gerald Ford."

This old man spoke about his father, who served in the Army during World War II, for four years, and in 1946 when he came home after shooting his way through Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia and up the Italian Boot the only job he could get was to be a postal clerk because nobody in private business at the time wanted to hire a Black man and pay him something he could live off of. Can ya'll imagine that? That kind of world is exactly what Donald Trump means when he says "Make America Great Again."

There was a time when Black folks could not travel long distances safely, when a Black family had to be almost ridiculously careful to not be visible as such while traveling, and a job transfer, even for a government job, or a military Permanent Change of Station could mean taking your life into your own hands. Look up the history of the Negro Motorist's Green Book if you don't believe me. I remember hearing a Tuskegee Airman speak about driving from Chicago to visit family in Mississippi in the 1950's. Formal Segregation started in Cairo (pronounced "Caro") Illinois, and that was that. Using the wrong drinking fountain could get somebody arrested, if not murdered.

And then Republicans want to get rid of the US Postal Service...and gut Medicare, Social Security and Veterans benefits...and spread nativism, paranoia, racism and stoke urban/rural divides?

Hell, I know Canadians who are nervous about visiting the United States, at this point.

Do ya'll understand why Black folks, particularly older Black folks, voted in droves for Joe Biden yet?

It's not just his association with Obama, although that helps.

We live in a world right now, where the people that were the little Black kids who integrated schools in the 1950's and 1960's are just now starting to age out, or even reach retirement age and become the old people who wile away the night reading some cheesy novel while their spouse plays the slot machines. We live in a world where Rep. John Lewis, a man with Stage 4 Pancreatic Cancer...can return in triumph to the bridge where he was beaten and tear-gassed as a young activist and stand next to the first Black US President and have all the presidential candidates for his party...save one, that is...have to make the effort to show up.

Because it has to be done, because it's the right thing to do. Service Before Self.

Because the people we stand against would wipe out every last one of those hard-won gains that lawyers like Thurgood Marshall fought for, so those kids could go to school, or for which Rep. John Lewis was beaten, or that my friend served to protect for all of us...so that my generation could watch the fall of the Soviet Union, do our service in peace, if we even wanted to (and most of us did not, and that's Okay) and then see the continuation of social change and the extension of rights to others such as LGBT folks and the recognition of countless new people groups not as less-than to White People, but as full and fellow citizens in their own right. We live in a world where even transgender people are gaining acceptance, much as gay people were 25 years ago.
I was there when Don't Ask, Don't Tell was the new thing, and seen as an amazing improvement over what was there before. Trust me, things are better now.

And there's people who'd piss all that away?! For WHAT?!?

Because your favorite candidate didn't get the nod? If that's the case, fuck you and I'm not sorry.

Because there's people out there who'd rat-fuck you, me, immigrants, non-Christians, LGBT people, People of Color, Jeff Sessions, Mitt Romney and any other White people that they hate and anybody who stands up for our country and Constitution, all alike, out of every human, political and social right we now possess, for Donald Trump? For their own vainglorious hatred? Who can say? But the truth is that is what they want to do.

Jeff Sessions, Roy Moore, and former football coach Tommy Tuberville all alike each ran on how much they loved Donald Trump...and it still wasn't enough to put any of them over the top, there's going to be a runoff election. For the record, Tommy Tuberville is the guy I posted about awhile back who is ranting about "Sharia Law" and Muslims taking over...in Alabama where you can't throw a rock without it hitting a Southern Baptist church. 

By the way, there's plenty of people out there, many of them from Alabama, who think the Southern Baptist Convention has gotten too "Liberal" because there have been efforts, however sporadic, in favor of diversity, racial reconciliation and against sexual abuse within the Church. 

Think about that for a second, and think about what those people would do to the rest of us, given the power.

Think about what those fucking people, those rabid conspiracy theorists, might do with a situation like a major global pandemic on our hands.

Think about what people who don't recognize the Christianity of people like Russell Moore, much less John Lewis...might do concerning public health, and especially with abundant misinformation concerning the virus and its origins, and who they might scapegoat instead of doing proper things like, ya know, protecting the population and trying to find a vaccine or something.

And I've got people trying to tell me that the guy to stop these absolute motherfuckers is some crazy fly-haired old socialist Soviet-sympathizer who believes phantom armies of Progressive voters will rise from the very ground if he gets the nomination...who just managed to offend damned near every single Latino voter in Florida? Many of those voters are Cubans and Central- and South-American immigrants or the descendants of immigrants who fled Communism or Communist-adjacent regimes or insurgent violence...and one hell of a lot of them are, in fact, former members of a solid Republican constituency won over by the Democrats over the last couple of decades through painstaking work and thanks in large part to the open embrace of racism by their former party at the national level. Note that actual Florida Republicans do not appear to be making the same mistake at least not at an institutional level, thus while Florida is considered a swing state in national terms, State-level Democrats always seem to end up playing second fiddle to State-level Republicans...and Bernie has likely damaged Democratic national-party credibility in Florida...especially if he's the nominee.

Remember that Obama won Florida, twice. Bernie has likely made winning it again, at all, harder.

You don't win people who have dealt with things like being driven from their own countries, death, imprisonment, murder and war over to supporting you or your cause by asking them what's wrong with the jailers and the killers. You don't win over people who fled Communism or keep them aligned to your cause by Mansplaining to them the glories of the Soviet Union or by trying to romanticize the very Cuban Revolution that may well have killed their grandparents or persecuted and driven out their parents.

Whether you agree with those people or not, you want to keep them on your side, you have to find some kind of common ground and go from that instead of alienating them...whether you agree with them and their take on the regimes, whether far-left or far-right, that they fled from. Authoritarian regimes of all kinds look largely the same from the perspective of the person staring down the muzzle of a rifle and hoping they don't die.

Telling the trees how great the chainsaw is probably is a bad idea.

That's not a political statement, that's a human statement, and that Bernie Sanders doesn't seem to understand shit like that...and would in fact ask a prisoner held in Cuba "what's wrong with Cuba?" speaks not only of bad political judgement or skills, but of simple failure to human properly.

And that's a risk we can't really afford, not for a guy whose voter base doesn't turn out to vote for him, not for a guy whose authoritarian, dogmatic style and pro-Communist fervor alienate even large percentages of the Democratic voter base.

Hell, one of the Bernie bros I know, damn near all he talks about is how bad the Democrats are. He almost never even says anything about Republicans or attacks them.

That doesn't help anybody.

And I say that as somebody who voted for Bernie Sanders in the 2016 Democratic primary.

The philosophy Bernie and his followers claim is "Not me, Us."

But I'm seeing an awful lot of people who'd gladly throw Us overboard if they don't get what they want. I'm seeing an awful lot of people out there who see in the votes of elders and Democrats of Color some kind of imaginary conspiracy, and people who are literally telling others "Fuck you, fuck your life and your rights if I don't get what I want."

I've seen an awful lot of homophobia, misogyny and even racism under the aegis of "Bernie or Bust."

And ya know what?

There's nothing liberal about that.

If that's how you really feel about your fellow human beings, if that's how you feel about my friend's rights or my Mom's social security or the benefits due our veterans or all of our rights, or the viability of our planet, and you think the rest of us Democrats are so bad...

Why don't you just go vote Republican? That seems to be who you want to win anyway.

Otherwise, you're going to have to deal with the fact that building the kind of world you want is going to be the work of decades, and to even get started, you have to win first, and consistently. But, to win, you have to show up. It's a whole lot less immediately satisfying, I suppose, than kicking over the table and ruining the game for everybody. But it's the right thing to do, it's the only thing we can do...especially if you actually do believe in the things you expend so many words talking about.

We live in a world where the Republicans have gotten so bad that they've lost Clint Eastwood, this should not be this hard to figure out.

It's not actually that I'm so in favor of Joe Biden, or so against Bernie Sanders. It's that I'd vote for an old rusty can full of cigarette butts and cockroaches if that was what was up against Donald Trump. The problem is Trump, he's gotta go. The problem is Republicans, they gotta go.

Until that happens all the Progressive ideas in the world will always be just that, ideas, purity pipe dreams that never go anywhere and lots of people who need help will never get it.

We can disagree about policy until the cows come home, but until you win, until you get the power to implement your policies, they're just so much masturbation. You can disagree with other Democrats without burning the house down around all of us. If we don't stand together, we will fall separately.

And then...you certainly won't get the things you want.

Oblivion in the pursuit of purity ain't my style, and it helps no one.

Cut that shit out and let's get to dealing with the work of life. 

I'm not asking you to like it. I'm asking you to do your duty as a citizen, to not be so selfish that you fail to live up to the values you profess and fail your fellow human beings...some of whose lives actually depend on putting an end to this current national disgrace.

If we really want to have a better nation, we have to be better citizens.

Brothers, sisters, comrades, I am here because I believe you have made a decision with insufficient information and foresight. I am aware of your earlier vote. I am aware that it was unanimous. Nonetheless, I believe we should restore the Springboks. Restore their name, their emblem and their colors, immediately. Let me tell you why. On Robben Island, in Pollsmoor Prison, all of my jailers were Afrikaners. For 27 years, I studied them. I learned their language, read their books, their poetry. I had to know my enemy before I could prevail against him. And we did prevail, did we not? All of us here … we prevailed. Our enemy is no longer the Afrikaner. They are our fellow South Africans, our partners in democracy. And they treasure Springbok rugby. If we take that away, we lose them. We prove that we are what they feared we would be. We have to be better than that. We have to surprise them with compassion, with restraint, and generosity. I know. All of the things they denied us. But this is no time to celebrate petty revenge. This is the time to build our nation using every single brick available to us – even if that brick comes wrapped in green and gold. You elected me your leader. Let me lead you now. 

~Nelson Mandela, as played by Morgan Freeman, Invictus.

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