If
all you care about this November is whether or not your person “wins”
or “loses,” then head on down to the dog track. Politics is not about
winning and losing. It’s not about the glory or the satisfaction. I know
it sounds hard to believe, but there used to be a time in this country,
not too long ago, where politics was actually about helping people.
-Helping people is making sure they can go to the hospital.
-Helping people is making sure they can go to school.
-Helping people is making sure they don’t go hungry.
-Helping people is making sure they have a roof over their heads.
-Helping people is making sure they have what they need to not only survive, but thrive.
It’s
not about you. It’s not about your success or your defeat. It’s not
about your personal satisfaction. Times have gotten so tough for so many
Americans that we are now talking about satisfaction writ large. In our
Constitution, it says this country exists to “provide for the common
defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of
liberty to ourselves and our posterity.”
Ourselves… AND our posterity.
None
of what you, personally, want matters anymore. It never should have
mattered in the first place. It’s about all of us. It’s depressing that
the country has to be rocked by instability, crisis and the advent of
fascism for this integrity to return to our political discourse, but now
that it has you will see an entire generation rising, and the sons and the daughters are beyond your command. They demand that things be done differently… and, oddly enough, it’s the
way things were done for their parents, or their grandparents, before the specter of Watergate
forever killed two generations’ perceptions of government.
We’re ready to
believe again. We’re ready to stand up for what we believe again. We
believe in America: unabashedly, uncynically, unrepentantly. We were
told great stories of the America where our parents or our grandparents
grew up: income equity, social mobility, and moving ever-forward toward a
just and peaceful future. We want that future, because we were told it
was meant to be now. We understand that it can’t happen overnight, but
we are appalled at how far things have fallen back from where they were,
and now, with almost nothing left to lose, we are willing to fight and
claw our way back onto equal social footing with the other prosperous
nations of the world.
I will end this with the words of John F. Kennedy, the Baby Boomer Bernie Sanders, as he took office for the first time in 1961:
At Your Service,
Doremus Jessup
We dare not forget today that we are the heirs of that first revolution. Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans—born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace, proud of our ancient heritage—and unwilling to witness or permit the slow undoing of those human rights to which this Nation has always been committed, and to which we are committed today at home and around the world.
Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty.
This much we pledge—and more.
At Your Service,
Doremus Jessup
