They are poor and they are angry. Their future looks bleak, they feel cheated, and they couldn’t care less about Shakespeare or Franklin Roosevelt. In the America where business is king, they’re nothing but business in school, maximizing profit for minimal investment. They have learned from birth how best to survive in this Nightmare World of Bottom Lines Over All, with its harsh lessons I only wish I could have learned ten years earlier. I’ve stopped blaming them, and I’ve stopped feeling sorry for them. Now, I feel sorry for the rest of us.The wild ride that has been the Bernie Sanders movement can work to help us adapt these feelings out of classrooms and into our daily lives in politics and society as a whole. We need to discuss this: generations of liberals come out of college and directly after are seeing themselves as anointed elites who are there to proclaim what Vox called the "Good Facts" to unwashed masses in a very Damien Sandow-like way. Although we may laugh at Mr. Sandow, it's a laugh that needs to come from knowing all too well that we used to, or still are, that guy... if gravely less muscularly defined.
Being in the Bernie movement, a movement that it seems will have a nigh-impossible struggle to achieve the nomination in July at Philadelphia, has given me a chance to see things from a new perspective. Let's face it: I'm a college-educated white rural cisgender man, so I have absolutely no idea what it's like to even be anything but top dog, if we're looking at the big picture. But, just like the rich kid who gets cut off from his inheritance and has to learn how to survive with the poors, my intellectual "inheritance" went poof as the economy crashed and the job market has yet to recover since 2007. Suddenly, respective to my own fairly privileged position, I was thrown from the relative comfort of middle-class to the relative drudgery of working-class. I pumped marine toilets, I toiled in commercial kitchens, and I spent months on the graveyard shift bagging bread at a local bakery, all the while seeing my bank accounts actually decrease because the low-wage money coming in wasn't enough to top the student loans going out. An entire generation got this rude awakening of what it's like to live, as Social Distortion so elegantly quipped, Down Here With The Rest Of Us.
All angst is relative, he quipped pedantically, and I've been able to use my time being slightly less well off than I used to be to understand much the same as being a substitute teacher and having paint thrown at me by unruly students caused me to understand their point of view. I never can, and never will understand how terrible life can be for some people in this country... but now I at least know that. And watching the Hillary supporters take a victory lap after my heart got crushed in California sent me looking for solace, instead I found Vox telling me I might have been the bad guy all along... and they're right.
Smugness won't work. Simply "knowing" your facts and figures and thinking that will go far enough to sway people to your anointed cause won't work. At the end of the day, we're all dirty, stupid, vapid, petty humans and that's what counts. Stay genuine, stay honest, and you'd be surprised how well the "smug liberal" ideas actually resonate with people outside of the liberal enclaves. Heck, don't take my word for it, look at Bernie cleaning house in places like North Dakota, or look at Robert Reich discovering new neighbors in the cause on his "Red State Tour"
We all hate the same stupid stuff. We have small differences, but in all reality it doesn't matter. I first started noticing this when I caught the last lines of a terrific documentary called Best of Enemies:
The ability to talk the same language is gone. More and more we're divided into communities of concern. Each side can ignore the other side and live in its own world. It makes us less of a nation because what binds us together is the pictures in our heads. But those people are not sharing those ideas. They're not living in the same place.What has happened, I think, is that things have finally gotten so bad that we do share the same concerns now, because the concerns are so big. Good roads. Good schools. Safe food. Clean air & water. Healthcare. A government that represents us and not the donors. Free and fair elections. An end to pointless war. The list goes on, but my main takeaway is this: we always have to be questioning what we think are the Good Facts, and we should never discount someone completely out of hand. Most of us on the left discounted the email investigation as just another Republican witch hunt, and now there's a looming possible indictment of a major political figure. As my father, an old farmer and anything but a liberal elitist would say, "even a blind sow finds an ear of corn sometimes," and we need to start paying attention when they do.
It's not left and right, democrats and republicans, liberals and conservatives anymore. It's those with all the money and the power versus the rest of us. Princeton proved it: money now influences politics, not public opinion. We're all Leona Helmsley's "little people" now, and just trying to put a finer point on which one of us is the tallest Munchkin isn't going to do us any good. Bernie and Trump have shown us that the majority of Americans have a similar frustration with "elites," and if the major parties discount that and continue to embrace the smugness, they're going to find out that there's a lot more down here with the rest of us than they ever thought.
In Solidarity,
Doremus Jessup
