We don't deserve Bernie

If I have my way about it, I will be voting for Mr. Sanders in the presidential election next year. Not for Clinton a (republican lite), not for any of the GOP clown bus riders. I vote based on whats best for business, my business. There is but a single candidate running who I feel represents what is best for my business. I want him to win so badly I can feel it, I can see it. But in another way, I do not want him to win. Sorry Bernie, as much as I will plug for you, spread your message, push for you to be our representative to the world and to be the leader of the Democratic Party, I really do not want you to win.

Pissed off yet progressives, liberals, and all you other Sanders supporters. Good. I love Bernie, he is a great guy, with tons of great ideas on how to fix our problems. Under sane, rational, and functional circumstances, the man would be the greatest president of my lifetime, the greatest president since FDR. But we are not in those times. We are still fighting over gay marriage, we are arguing over who deserves a living wage, we are still pushing towards war. We cannot even get through a single election without charges of fraud.

Is he the man we want and need. Certainly, we need him, we need more people like him. We want him, after 35 years of trickle down economics, of big business running the show we want real change. Obama tried and we turned our backs on him. Can he win, certainly, as his message reaches the masses he will gain traction, Clinton will implode. On top of that, even with gerrymandering, we liberals (and centrist democrats) still outnumber conservatives in most areas.

Do we deserve Bernie. No. We will not manage to give him the tools he needs to see his vision complete. Sure, he can take the bully pulpit, and at this point, I would cheer him on if he did. We need to slap these career politicians down. But, the reality is, we will turn out backs on him. We will cast him out, we will be disheartened when his failures mount because the GOP cannot find itself compromising. That is a real pity, because this nation could do so much more if it's representatives and people could get their acts together. For that single reason, we do not deserve him as our president. Just as we do not deserve Obama as our president.

It pains me to say this but... We deserve someone from the clown bus. We deserve the likes of Trump. We even deserve someone like Clinton, a slightly moderate version of a Republican. I know, when we get one, things will go to hell, but lets be honest, how many of us have been surviving in a state of hell for the last 35 years, with centrists and conservatives at the wheel.

We will loose more grand in the Supreme Court, more conservative activist judges will be appointed. More rulings along the grounds of Citizens United will come. Cases against abortion, gay marriage, the EPA, regulations will likely be ruled on, and not in the favor of those seeking to protect the rights of the people.

So why, why would I consider not voting if Clinton is nominated? Because, we deserve what we get. We deserved the 2008 economic crash. We deserve having our rights taken from us. We deserve to have the NSA spying on us. We continually put people in positions of power who take our rights, who refuse to accept that we deserve a living wage, clean air to breath, clean water to drink. People who think that health care is a privilege, not a necessity. That all can be made right with a pistol on your side, and a rifle hanging from your shoulder. A group of people who want citizens to be “dog shit stupid”, so they are easily influenced and misinformed, and do not care that they are.

That is the thing, with the GOP we know what we get, with Sanders we know what we get, with Clinton we have a wild-card. In time, with the GOP and Clinton, things will continue to get worse. Women will continue to suffer with lower pay, we will have another president who will bend to nearly every whim. We will continue to see a political shift to the right, and the laws of the land will continue to shift to the right. Hard fought victories will be erased. Things will get bad, and maybe we can learn the lesson. It is a tried and true lesson we should have learned a hundred years ago. When you shift so completely to the right, to the hands of corporations, to becoming isolationists, we do more harm to ourselves than to others. We will be in another set of constant wars, we will be the police state of the world. We will have more people living in poverty, worse health-care, more gun deaths, more suicides, more homeless people, more openly racist people, and more of our elders eating Ramen Noodles and cat food.

Then, we will temporarily learn something, we went the wrong way. We will spend decades rebuilding, we will suddenly shift from where we are to the opposite way, just as we started in the 1930's. There will be suffering on a scale we have not witnessed. It will be more difficult to rebuild, and if you have to ask yourself why? Unless there is another massive World War, and the fighting is not based in the US we will not have the luxury of every other economic power in the world being decimated.

Even if we started today, it would take at least four decades to undue the current problems with income inequality, reeducating our youth, fixing our infrastructure, and reversing the damage we have done. I will be dead before the damage is fully repaired from what has already happened. The longer we continue this centrist and conservative slant, the longer it will take, if it can ever be fixed. I have heard that Climate Change has hit the no return point. We can only hope to mitigate the worst of it, and this planet will never fully recover (I think it will, but we are looking at millions of years if we stopped everything we are doing immediately).

Yeah, I feel badly for the children who are going to have to deal with this. But in the long run, if we as a race, a species can survive with a GOP president, or Clinton we might finally learn. If we can survive, we might be able to reform our government, and actually come out ahead. We can start if we get Bernie in the White House, if we get him the tools he needs to enact his vision, if we back him up at every turn. If we can do that, we can start fixing things now. We can do the things we need to do, go to the places only dreamed of. We can start restoring the American Dream.