Confessions of a Sandernista
By Tom Calarco
My heart aches. Not for losing what I had, but for losing what I had hoped to get. Ever since I marched against the war in Vietnam, I have had this hope, this ache in my heart. It was a chance to make the world a better place, a chance to turn the tables on what we saw is a corrupt U.S. empire that ironically has made our own lives more prosperous and free than anywhere else. When Bernie Sanders declared his candidacy and began saying the things that I had locked up inside me for more than 40 years, my spirit soared. Here was the champion I had long been waiting for.
“We live in a world today where there are several hundred million people starving to death. They’re starving to death right now. We live in a world where my guess is between all the superpowers and the other nations of the world, close to one trillion dollars is being spent every single year on weapons, on more and more nuclear bombs, on the most sophisticated nerve gases that can wipe people out and paralyze them, and yet with the all the brilliance and all the fine technology and all the robots and the great medical research they do in the hospitals, civilization hasn’t advanced one bloody iota for the last thousands of years.”
Bernie said this in 1985. Like me, he had been a conscientious objector against the war in Vietnam, and he was saying this now and much more as a candidate for President, telling us that Congress and the Presidency did not represent the interests of the people but of the elite 1/10 of One Percent whom they served. I had known this back when I was marching to end the war in Vietnam in 1969, and worked in a nursing home instead of serving the interests of the military-industrial complex that President Eisenhower had warned us about in 1960. Here was a man who had the courage to say this to the nation today and who was asking for our support. I was in love with his message.
I immediately bought two Bernie t-shirts at the beginning of last summer and wore them everywhere. At first there was not much recognition but gradually more and more people were feeling the Bern. I went to Bernie parties, phone banked, canvassed, wrote an Op-Ed for the local online magazine, donated multiple times in increments of three dollars, and held a Bernie event that drew 70 people. When the state primary was held, I stood outside the polling place with my Bernie regalia and sign, and maybe, I thought, had a small part in my county going for Bernie. I was really feeling the Bern.
As the primaries moved on, Bernie seemed to be gaining momentum and he scored a big upset in Michigan when all the pundits were counting him out. One on CBS News, Lynda Tran, called for Bernie to withdraw just before the Michigan results came in, because she said he was causing Hillary to lose time, energy, and funds that could be used for her Presidential campaign. I was outraged.
I did some research on Ms. Tran and learned that the communications organization she had founded, 270 Strategies, had worked with Ready for Hillary, the early grassroots effort to launch Hillary’s Presidential campaign. I wondered what she was doing posing as a journalist with such a conflict of interest, and why CBS News had allowed her to be in that position. Obviously, it was part of the effort to stop Bernie by the media which WikiLeaks has now shown to have been complicit with the DNC.
Following Michigan, it seemed more and more reports of voter suppression, poll manipulation, and registration tampering surfaced. In the pivotal New York primary when Bernie still had momentum, Bernie drew a crowd of upwards of 28,000 in his hometown of Brooklyn. Pundits were saying a Bernie win would turn the nomination into a fight to the finish. And Bernie did win the vote in upstate New York; in the New York City metro area, it was a different story. But the 126,000 votes that were thrown out in of all places, Brooklyn, suggest that something suspicious had been taking place.
In fact, statistical analyses were showing evidence of hacked voting machines in many Democratic primaries. Wide discrepancies between exit polls and final tallies were found that always favored Hillary. It was only in the weeks prior to the convention after Bernie was close to being mathematically eliminated that I learned of this. Among the numerous articles posted about this was one by Spencer Gundert that I thought thorough and incisive: Hillary Clinton and Electoral Fraud
Outrage is too tame a word to describe my feelings when learning of the rampant fraud. I was fucking pissed. I learned that Bernie Rally buses were being organized around the country to go to Philadelphia to protest. I wanted to go to Philadelphia to protest. Bernie had said he was going to fight for the nomination all the way to the Convention and I wanted to be there to support him.
There had been rumors, however, that Bernie was going to endorse Hillary. I hadn’t believed them. How could he? The Clintons are bonafide figureheads of the One Percent who Bernie had rallied us to fight against. She represented Wall Street, the establishment. In a 17-month period from 2014-to-2015, she had been paid $11.9 million for one-hour speeches to corporations, banks, and corporate trade organizations; her husband, $13 million.
This is peanuts when one considers Hillary’s connections to international business and the world’s wealthiest individual through the Clinton Foundation. According to one report I saw online the Clinton Foundation is an ongoing criminal enterprise engaged in “money laundering and soliciting bribes in exchange for political, policy and legislative favors to individuals, corporations and even governments both foreign and domestic.” We’re talking numbers in the billions of dollars. How can peons like us protesting her nomination compete with all this money talking for her?
In the meantime, I posted information about the fraud on Facebook and disseminated links to various articles about it via email to friends and those in my county Democratic Party for which I was a precinct captain. I don’t know how many people actually read them but the immediate reaction of those who responded was disdain and denial. One lady with whom I engaged in an email debate asked that I stop sending such emails. Others in the party said I was being unprofessional for doing so. Another well respected colleague not in the county party charged that it was all Republican propaganda and that Hillary was the best qualified candidate and that it was about time we had a woman President. He said to question him was an insult.
Then as the rumors increased, I was shocked to learn that the endorsement was imminent. I watched it via live stream on the Internet. I watched as they smiled at each other so warmly as if they were best friends. It was as if everything that Bernie had been saying suddenly was meaningless, that all the hours we had spent campaigning and fighting for his ideas were tossed in the toilet. I was in shock, shell shock, like the soldiers in World War I when a projectile whistled by and nearly blew out their ears. I was reeling. I needed Hemingway to come to my aid and pick me up in his ambulance like he did wounded soldiers in Farewell to Arms.
How could Bernie give up when he had promised to fight all the way to convention? How could he give up when all the reports of voter fraud and voter rigging were pouring in on the Internet — yes, the Internet, not mainstream media. No one in the mainstream media was or is exploring this. The news outlets that reach the silent majority who absorb their news like sponges without question were and are still silent about it. No, the official story is that Hillary had beaten Bernie fair and square, just like all the official stories that have been lies that the government has been feeding us for years to “manufacture our consent.”
I was devastated. I felt betrayed. I decided not to go to Philadelphia. What was the point? He said he hadn’t conceded but he had endorsed “that woman,” as Bill Clinton once said. He said he would even campaign for her to prevent Trump from getting elected. There was such a sense of finality about it.
I put it away, emotionally. Then I heard an impassioned podcast by Mikki Willis, a photographer for Bernie who had traveled with him during the campaign. He said that Bernie had been pressured to endorse Hillary, that the DNC would’ve have removed him from the speakers’ roster if he didn’t, that his delegates would be locked out of events. He said that Bernie had every intention of continuing the revolution and that we needed to be in Philadelphia to support him. He convinced me and I decided to go.
I was going with four women. Two of them, both teachers, I had never met. The others I had met at a Bernie phone bank party. I had shared contact information with one and we had spoken on the phone a couple of times. I called her and said I was going. The lady who had organized the trip and located the two-bedroom apartment where we were staying created a private Facebook page for us, the DNC Invaders. We were going to invade Hillary’s party and had hopes, if only slim, that Bernie would somehow pull a rabbit out of the hat and get the nomination.
We went in two cars. I went with Mel and Mary, and we stayed in a hotel outside Philly the first night. The teachers, Kelly and Lisa, were coming the next day, Saturday, and expected to arrive late in the evening. It was so hot upon our arrival and the forecast was for mid-to-upper 90s all week. We unloaded our things in the old Victorian building, trudging up these unbelievably steep stairs to our apartment on the third floor. It was as hot as a sauna and we turned on the air conditioners full blast.
Mel and Mary were meeting two of Mel’s friends from Canada, who just happened to be in Philly that weekend, and they were going to pick us up and drop me off at the “Peoples’ Convention” downtown while they partied around the city. The convention which gathered progressive groups and activists was held at the old Friends Meeting on Arch Street, a large Georgian-style brown brick building much like many Quaker meeting houses you might see. It had started at 11 a.m. and I didn’t get there until around 2 p.m. Outside people loitered; inside was a confusion of activity. In one area, a people’s platform of progressive issues was being discussed; in another, a typical Friends Meeting gallery, were speakers; and in a spacious cafeteria, a series of table talk discussions. I drifted into the latter.
About six or seven people sat at each table, one of them being a designated facilitator, and a new topic was introduced every 30 minutes. People would change tables at the end of each topic. I sat down at a table and introduced myself to a facilitator. The topic at hand was forming coalitions. In fact, though the second topic for which I changed tables was about activism and our previous experience as activists, the discussion at both shifted to what was next for the revolution in the post-Bern era. Whether someone was personally involved in an issue like Climate Change, Move to Amend Citizens United, or Black Lives Matter, the common thread was unification, inclusiveness, bringing all the progressive issues under one umbrella, and working together as a unified force for change. One of them who just happened to sit at both tables with me was a Move to Amend activist named Eugene, a very passionate and articulate young man who lived in the area. However, the problem for us was that with Bernie endorsing Hillary, we had lost our leader; we had lost the unifier of our separate causes.
The focus of the Convention shifted to the gallery where keynote speakers, Green Party Presidential candidate Jill Stein and former Ohio state senator Nina Turner, one of Bernie’s staunchest supporters, were going to appear. I had heard about both but didn’t know about much about either. In the gallery, which accommodated several hundred people and which was nearly full, were people of all ages, a mostly white crowd. Bernie signs and Bernie t-shirts proliferated and one couple from Michigan told me that a little birdie had told them that Bernie had something in the works for the convention and that we would all be in for a big surprise. How we all clung to that hope and you could feel the Bern buzzing in the air.
A few speakers made preliminary remarks at the podium while we awaited the keynoters. The energy grew with chants accompanied by clapping:
“Bernie, Bernie, Bernie, Bernie!”
“Jill, Jill, Jill, Jill!”
“Stop, stop, TPP! Stop, stop, TPP! Stop, stop TPP!”
Nina Turner suddenly entered from the left side. The crowd cheered and howled and she responded with a huge smile, waving to the crowd which started rhythmical clapping. When the clapping and cheering finally subsided, she began in her rousing, evangelical style typical of black preachers. She referenced the WikiLeaks that had just been released incriminating the DNC in rigging the nomination for Hillary, saying “It is un-American, undemocratic, and unpatriotic.” Responding to the announcement that she had been removed from introducing Bernie at the DNC, she said, “I’m not leaving the Democratic Party, I wouldn’t give them the satisfaction.” Turner knows how to whip up a crowd into a frenzy of cheering and hollering, and she did just that.
When it was Stein’s turn, she seemed almost subdued in contrast, but her volume and emotion grew. She had more substantive comments, I thought, than Turner: “I’m not afraid of Donald Trump, I’m afraid of Climate Change.” Also, in reference to Trump and U.S. militarism, “We don’t need a wall, we just need to stop invading other countries,” and “We need a new kind of offensive in the Middle East, a peace offensive.” Regarding immigration, she added. “Sixty-five million refugees worldwide … are fleeing U.S. predatory military policy.”
She also talked about asking Bernie once again to head up the Green Party ticket for President. Of course, this is what everyone in the audience was hoping for. As her speech closed, the raucousness of the crowd had built to the intensity it had for Turner. It was a good feeling to be with so many who were as passionate as me about the revolution Bernie ignited. I left that afternoon with some optimism for the coming Democratic Party convention, hoping like many others that Bernie would pull the proverbial rabbit out of the hat.
That night there was a happy hour at one of the local establishments where numerous Bernie supporters hung out. Mel and Mary met me with their Canadian friends. The hubby of Mel’s friend was very funny and we went in search of a place to eat. We had a good time eating and drinking, and making conversation. Later, we went back to the original establishment and I ran into Eugene, the Move-to-Amend activist. Another Berner I met was a young lady who had been forced to quit school because of mounting debt and had come to support Bernie all the way from southern California.
When we got back to our apartment, Kelly and Lisa arrived and we helped them unload. It was now me and four ladies. Mel and Mary had bedrooms to themselves, Kelly had the futon, Lisa brought a really nice, nearly queen-size air mattress (I never saw such a nice air mattress) and I got the leather upholstered half faint couch. I never knew what a half faint couch was before this, but I would get to know it well during the next five nights. If only I had a queen-size air mattress like Lisa. But then it never would’ve fit because the three of us were so close together we could almost touch each other. It was the least of our concerns as the sweet anticipation of the afternoon march for Bernie helped us drift off to sleep.
The next morning we made our coffee and prepared to go downtown. We weren’t sure what was happening besides the march for Bernie. Originally, Bernie was going to hold a rally at FDR Park, which is adjacent to the convention center (something we didn’t know at the time) for his supporters. However, the application to hold the event had been turned down by the city for some technicality, which to me seemed like the work of the DNC, once again suppressing Bernie’s freedom of expression. In any case, there was talk that he might appear somewhere that day, or at least we were hoping. I went downtown to City Hall with Kelly and Lisa; Mel and Mary were going to follow a little later.
When we got there, we learned that a preliminary march, a march protesting Climate Change, was taking place before the Bernie march. In fact, despite the listings of events online by various media outlets we were in a quandary about where to go and what to do the whole time we were there. It seemed that Bernie’s campaign had been dismantled and was no longer communicating with his supporters. It made things very frustrating. We never knew exactly who was speaking where or what was about to take place.
It was so hot. Dripping sweat hot. Months of perspiration campaigning for Bernie had come to this. Our hopes shattered by his endorsement of Hillary still had life. Almost every marcher carried a sign and a smart phone, and many were filming and photographing as they marched, some broadcasting the events live on Facebook, as Mel did. Ban Fracking, Protect the Earth from Poisons, Jail Oil Execs, Climate Action is our Obligation, Nuclear Free Carbon Free were among the slogans.
It was such a different ambience than when I had protested the Vietnam War more than 40 years before. Few were under 30 then, now the protesters were of all ages, the radicals of the sixties marching along with their grandchildren. Cell phones were science fiction and signs much less prevalent; now they were ubiquitous. Most everyone had a t-shirt with a political message. A few even had bullhorns. One led us in a call and response chant as the march began down Market Street:
We just want a solar nation / we just want a solar nation
We don’t want your frack pollution / we don’t want your frack pollution
We don’t’ want your radiation / we don’t want your radiation
We just need a clean revolution / we just need a clean revolution.
Not only was the ambience different but the emotional feeling. Never had I felt anything like this. It was soulberning, a response to a movement whose power surprised me. Earthshaking in a figurative sense and I could feel it moving under my feet.
We are the 99 percent
We are the 99 percent
We are the 99 percent
All that we had read, learned, seen, felt of climate change, polluted air, dirty rivers, contaminated lakes, melting icebergs, toxic fish, oil spills, the poisoning of our food supply and devastation of ecosystems, and the extinction of species moved us in unison.
TPP, we must fight
Destroy the planet
Is not your right
The march took us down to the old part of town near the site of the People’s Convention where some speakers addressed a small crowd. We were hungry and grabbed a bite to eat. Another longer march was ahead and we had to head back to city hall. There we met up with Mel and Mary, and began the long Bernie March to FDR park next to the Wells Fargo DNC site.
Blue Bernie signs were everywhere and I never felt the Bern like this before: “Feel the Bern,” we chanted over and over. We were there to support Bernie whom we all knew, well before WikiLeaks had released evidence of DNC rigging, had been cheated. We were all there to protest that it had stolen our votes and tossed them into the gutter where we now proudly marched in defiance.
Hell no, DNC, we won’t vote for Hillary
Hell no, DNC, we won’t vote for Hillary
Hell no, DNC, we won’t vote for Hillary
This was the longest march we would undertake, a good four miles, and the hottest. Fortunately bottles of cold water were being distributed along the way, and several times I used the cold bottles to cool my brow. Support was also provided by the fire department which opened the fire hydrants to spray water on us for relief. There also were drummers, which along with the call response chants inspired us forward. My favorite, with a cadence that held the word “what” for an instant, was about democracy:
Tell me what democracy looks like
This is what democracy looks like
Tell me what democracy looks like
This is what democracy looks like
Tell me what democracy looks like
This is what democracy looks like
It was fitting because the Democratic Party is anything but democratic now. Democracy requires transparency and the free flow of information. For instance, Sherrod Brown, one of its leading Progressives, just signed the SMART label bill that makes it difficult for one to know if GMOs are in a food product, and President Obama promptly signed it. This autocratic bill only benefits the manufacturer of GMOs and the products that support them — Monsanto. Even worse, Obama is pushing to sign the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a treaty that was created in secret by corporate lobbyists that will send more American jobs overseas, lower environmental standards, increase the cost of pharmaceutical drugs, and weaken the government’s ability to regulate products and financial institutions. The American people have had no say in the 622 pages that detail its provisions. You call that democracy, President Obama, leader of the Democratic Party?
As we closed in on our destination, the police presence increased, some on bicycles, and formed a cordon at the edges. Finally, after what might have been the most photographed and videotaped protest march in American history, we arrived at FDR Park, adjacent to the chain-link fenced-off convention area. Kelly seemed to have vanished but this would not be the first time she drifted off on her own, always managing to find her way back to us. This park was where Bernie originally was supposed to speak and rally us. We still were hoping for some kind of miracle to happen at this point. The Convention would begin the next day and we could only speculate. We really were in a quandary about what was going to happen next and still wondered if he might actually appear somewhere like a beatific vision.
We were exhausted at day’s end from the withering heat and slept in. Lisa was staying home the next day to finish up her grades for the term — she had been teaching an online class. The rest of us took a bus into town. That was a mistake. The marches and closed streets were wreaking havoc with the bus routes. It seemed like an eternity to get downtown. Once there we headed for South Street, the street of which the Orlons sang, “the hippest street in town” in 1963.
After some of Philly’s finest cheesesteaks at Jim’s, we went next door to the Eye’s Gallery. It specialized in Mexican art. But a friend had called me on my cell, who was watching coverage on TV and said a demonstration was going on near the DNC. I wanted to get to where the action was and told the ladies I would meet them there. I got on the subway and met two Berners on the way. We headed to the site, chatting all the way as if we were fast friends. That was something about being a Berner. It created an instant connection with other Berners. In the Berniverse all are created equal and all have each other’s respect without reservation or question.
We walked past the chain link fence enclosing the convention site to FDR Park where we heard that Jill Stein was going to speak under a tent there. It was beginning to cloud up but it didn’t faze anyone. I was walking around the field where Berners of all Progressive persuasions were strewn like so many candy wrappers when a man collapsed, probably from heat exhaustion. Organizers cleared space around him, and I approached a lady sitting under a tree and asked her what she knew about events being held later when someone tapped me on the shoulder from behind. It was Eugene.
This reminded me of the time in 1969 I ran into a Hare Krishna follower at the DC march protesting the war whom I had met in Boston several months earlier. It was an example of why people believe in fate, that there is some synchronicity in existence, of how an idea, a movement drives people together unconsciously. We only spoke briefly and though it was only a coincidence that I would meet Eugene on three separate occasions in Philadelphia, perhaps it is representative of a greater force driving this political revolution, something much greater than Bernie, who is merely an instrument, a catalyst to renew the flame for freedom, justice, and equality in America.
The next thing I knew Eugene was gone and under the tent from which I was standing about 30 yards Jill Stein had started to speak. The clouds were thickening and the wind started to whip up. It was a bit chaotic with people scattered everywhere and the flashing lights of a rescue squad having arrived for the fallen man. Then came the rain. A downpour. In minutes I was soaked. People huddled under trees but it did little good. After a while the intensity of the rain slowed and I called Kelly to see what had happened to my lady friends. It turned out they had made it to the protest site but were now separated. Kelly said that Mel and Mary had gone back to take the subway to our apartment and that she was in front of the convention area.
I walked towards the fenced area during a “Hell No, DNC, We Won’t Vote for Hillary” chant by soaked demonstrators, simultaneously chanting and filming when my camera caught Kelly’s face. It was still raining but we were so soaked it no longer mattered. We decided to go back to the subway and meet up with the others. I had called Lisa while huddling under a tree and she said she had prepared dinner for us. As we walked back, with lines of others headed in the same direction, we came to a traffic hold-up under a highway overpass. A hundred or more demonstrators who had taken refuge under it from the rain were impeding the flow of traffic. Whether intentional or not, it seemed some demonstrators were taking the lead to move people away from the road to let cars pass.
I passed through the parting waves of demonstrators and lost track of Kelly. As I was walking away, I noticed people in front of me had stopped and were looking behind. I turned around and saw that demonstrators were standing in front of a box truck. I walked back and started filming. On the side of the box was the inscription, “Hillary’s America.” And in front of the truck was Kelly. She said she wasn’t holding the truck up like others but trying to encourage them to let it pass.
At the train station we met Mary, who said Mel had called an Uber to take her back. The three of us got on the packed subway and met Rangelay, a lady from Oregon, who led the car in chants of “This is what democracy looks like.”
When we got home, Lisa was waiting for us with dinner. We cleaned and were treated to my favorite food as a kid, ravioli. I was really starting to like Lisa. In fact, I think she was everyone’s favorite among us, kind of like the mom of the group, the glue that held us all together.
It was getting rather late but then someone found a live stream of Bernie making his speech, endorsing Hillary at the convention. It was similar to the many speeches he had made about himself and what he would do if he were President, only now he was saying this is what Hillary would do. It was a disheartening moment. My ravioli high dissipated. Bernie had not pulled a rabbit out of the hat, he had nothing up his sleeve, he was not going to get the nomination, or so it seemed, and though the roll call of votes was yet to come the next day, Hillary’s nomination now seemed inevitable.
I had another glass of wine and then Mel went and got the guy who lived in the second floor apartment, a colorful young gay black graduate student with a striking personality, who painted Mel’s toenails. The bizarreness of it all made me feel a bit out of place. Marvin was a marvelous character, to say the least. But I went to bed. Kelly who didn’t drink was already there working on her SMART phone while the others drank and sang songs, notably choruses of Simon and Garfunkel, one of my favorite groups of the 60s. But I wasn’t in the mood for singing.
The next day we went to the Black Lives Matter March. It was smaller than the others. Prior to it, there was a speaker who focused on the many unarmed or innocent black Americans who had in the past couple of years been unjustly killed by police. Signs with their names were passed out to marchers, and just before we began, they asked all whites to go to the back. One black man did not and I heard him say that’s bullshit. In any case, the number of white marchers far outnumbered blacks and people just let it pass as rather meaningless. It was the lives lost by innocent black people that mattered. Interestingly, a few were dressed in riot gear and masks. I asked one of them why and he explained that he was a veteran and knew how to help people get out of the way if violence began to occur. Their gear made Kelly a bit apprehensive and she began worrying we might be gassed or worse.
It was another very hot march, and the most common chant was: “What do we want? Justice! When do we want it? Now! If we don’t get it … Shut it down. If we don’t get it … Shut it down!” The riot gear also must’ve unconsciously made me even more aware of the police, many of whom were actually smiling. Overall, I’d have to say that the Philadelphia police bent over backwards to be congenial and were a model of community policing, of ensuring that everyone was safe and that no one got hurt.
The march went for about two miles and we were marching on Broad Street straight towards city hall. The image of its white masonry tower that stands 548 high with a 37-foot statue of William Penn atop remains fixed in my mind. It includes pillars, clocks, and statues of Native Americans, eagles and other figures. Built in 1894, it was the tallest inhabited structure in the world at that time. With such illustrious symbols decorating the tower, it expressed why it is called the city of brotherly love, the place where the Quaker William Penn made peace with the Native Americans, the place where Americans declared their freedom when they signed the Declaration of Independence as represented by the eagles. It was awe-inspiring.
When we got to city hall, we weren’t sure if the march would continue to FDR Park. The others did not want to go on, and Kelly had decided to return to the apartment, but I continued a little farther. However, the march dispersed and I rejoined the group who were sitting at a table in a small plaza outside city hall. To our delight and shock, some Berners approached us with the news that Bernie had won the first roll call. We were unsure about what this meant. It sounded too good to be true.
In any case, we were helpless to do anything, and we were hungry. We roamed the city’s small byways until we came across a Spanish-style restaurant picked out by Mel, the foodie among us. They had a wide selection of tapas, and we each ordered three which we shared. Our next stop, led by Mel who is a compulsive singer, took us to a karaoke bar. Along the way, Mary tripped and had a bad fall. She had already injured her toe, so she was now in great pain.
The karaoke experience was probably the low or high point of our trip depending on how you look at it. Both Lisa and I who are not karaoke singers drank enough to fortify our attempts. We even did a duet and it seemed like fun at the time. But Mel recorded it and she later played it for us, and as you might expect, we sounded more like two sick cats. When we got home we were feeling no pain despite learning that Hillary had been nominated.
It was Wednesday and I was really low. I’m sure the others were feeling various degrees of the blues, and it certainly wasn’t in support of the Democratic Party blue. We learned that hundreds of Bernie supporters had walked out and that a minor confrontation occurred between protesters and security outside the convention center when the fence had briefly been breached. They were angry that the party continued to ignore the voter fraud, the conspiracy against Bernie, and the cheating that had occurred in their executive committee.
How could they condone such wrong doing? How could they condone Hillary Clinton hiring Deborah Wasserman Schultz after WikiLeaks had shown that she rigged the nomination? How could they continue to pretend that they believed in democracy by doing so?
One of those who walked out is a friend of mine and she said that she felt like a prisoner because of actions by security that included taking away their critical political signs like “Stop the TPP,” severely restricting their movement, refusing their entry into events despite their credentials, and warnings to take away credentials for any disapproval of Hillary.
A posting on Facebook after the walkout linked to an ad on Craigslist seeking to hire 700 actors for $50 a night to come to the convention center and cheer on cue for Hillary. A later posting debunked it. However, Bernie delegate, Jeff Day, who had not walked out confirmed that it was true, that hundreds of new faces appeared at the convention and they were cheering for the cameras.
A very poignant post on Facebook by Bernie delegate, Gabriel McArthur, said that security actually took away the cane of a blind Bernie delegate, Mark Lasser, for fear he would use it on someone. McArthur ended his video by saying he would continue fighting for the revolution, something all Berners should applaud. A different disabled Bernie delegate, whose name I don’t recall, complained about the lack of accessibility for the disabled at the convention. Whatever happened to the ADA, Democratic Party?
Very troubling was a Facebook post that suggested Bernie had been threatened at the convention on Sunday and roughed up by “Clinton goons. A close-up image of him at the convention showed a swollen gash on his right cheek. Considering the allegations about the Clintons going back to Arkansas which her supporters allege are merely baseless attacks by her enemies and the recent unexplained murder of DNC voter expansion analyst, Seth Rich, it makes you wonder. Of course, Bernie’s gash could’ve been an accident. Most of us want to believe that. It’s hard to accept that our government and our leaders would be so ruthless. However, if one reads through the history of our intelligence agencies, they will find that our government has often carried out political assassinations, and the Clintons would not be the first politicians at the executive level to use strong arm tactics — for instance, LBJ, or Obama’s use of drones.
The next morning we left Philadelphia uncertain as to what was next, why Bernie had not fought up to the end as he promised, and whether we should vote for Hillary to prevent a Trump presidency as Bernie had urged. An article by a Bernie supporter pointed out, however, that Bernie had made some shrewd moves. Not only had he solidified his leverage in the Senate but he had motioned to suspend the rules and put on record his delegate count. This meant that if Hillary was forced to abdicate the nomination, his delegates would still need to be considered and he’d be in line to get the nomination and become the next POTUS.
The outcome of our invasion of Philadelphia was massively disappointing. But it also made me realize how important it is to stand up for what you believe if you want a free and just society. Say what you will about Bernie, if it weren’t for him, many of us would not be feeling this berning desire to do what’s right not only for America but the rest of the world, to stand up and say we no longer will suffer being led by immoral governments and leaders whose main objective is to enrich themselves. We should thank Bernie for giving us this political awareness.
As the immortal Yogi, New York Yankee legend of American baseball lore, said, “It ain’t over, till it’s over.”
Julian Assange of WikiLeaks continues to release incriminating information about the Clintons, and if only American mainstream media would cover it, if only some enterprising reporter or reporters would defy their bosses and show the American people that the truth is there if we open our eyes, maybe we can bring down Clinton.
Berners like me are still hoping for a miracle, that truth and justice will win out, and that the American way of life will once again move towards the promise that our Founding Fathers envisioned when they wrote our Constitution: freedom, justice, and equality for all.
