Dear Hillary Clinton Supporters,

I live in Iowa.  I was at the caucus.  My local precinct contained all of 56 people and we argued over who would win our one delegate for almost an hour before it finally fell to Bernie by one person.  Emotions ran high on both sides and the debate was fierce, but it was clear at some point that there would be no swaying the Hillary camp and there would be no swaying the Bernie camp.  It would come down to the three O’Malley supporters and the one undecided to make or break it for one candidate.  

I am as happy as the rest of Iowa that the caucus is over.  The spotlight was burning just a little too hot this year, but for a very good reason.  Democracy is in full swing.  Full disclosure, I was a precinct captain for Bernie Sanders.  I was asked early in the campaign to help corral the masses in his corner.  This was a huge leap of faith for me because I am, by nature, a complete introvert bordering on recluse.  It requires a huge amount of energy for me to walk up to people, introduce myself and engage them in conversation, especially political conversation.  On top of that, some of the houses that I walked up too had clearly written notices, “This House Protected by Smith and Wesson” so not only was I outside my comfort zone, but there was a chance that I could have been shot as well, so strong is my support of Bernie.  

I know that Bernie supporters lately have gotten something of a bad rap as being “over the top” a little overzealous, but let me give you a perspective for one such “over the top” supporter.  
Hillary is more than capable.  Of this I have no doubt.  She is vetted, she has survived being First Lady married to Bill, she has been a U.S. Senator, she was Secretary of State.  She has, time and again, proven her worth and would do a fantastic job of running the country in relatively the same way it has been run for the last eight years.

But there is the rub.  I know that Hillary knows how to play by the current rules.  She knows the ins and outs of campaign finance, the rules of engagement when it comes to dealing with Republicans.  She knows how to walk the Wall street walk and talk the lobbyist talk in order to get the financial support that comes in handy to someone running a campaign, but it is at that point that the average Bernie supporter starts to build up a head of steam and launch overboard.

We, the average people, have watched for the last eight years as deals have been made - some good, some bad, but all of them mostly excluding us entirely.  We have watched as the Affordable Care Act became mostly affordable to the large insurance companies that continue to demand high premiums while simultaneously demanding large deductibles.  We have watched while the upper 1% has continued to amass huge sums of money, while we scrape the change off the floors of our cars to give to the local homeless guy - a veteran missing both his legs that panhandles on the corner every day of the week.  Enough is enough.

So along comes an angry, Jewish, Democratic Socialist in the twilight of his career that says simply and straightforwardly, “The system is rigged and this is how”.  There is not one point that he makes that doesn’t ring true in our average person heart.  We are tired of working more than one job and still not being able to make ends meet, we are tired of funding wars that only lead to more terrorism, we are tired of not getting the healthcare we need, we are tired of watching corporations buy politicians and establish whatever loopholes are necessary to line their pockets nicely while simultaneously bleeding us dry.  We are tired of watching the environment get raped while we wonder why it is that people in Flint are being quietly poisoned with water that flows through their pipes.

In short, we are tired.

When something isn’t working you have three options:  You can do nothing and continue on being tired and frustrated, you can backtrack and become fearful and hate-filled (take heed, for beyond this point there be Republicans), or you can move forward and change the system. Bernie Sanders is option number three.  

There is power in progress.  There is power in seeking out solutions to problems and tackling them even when the odds are stacked against you.  There is mastery in reaching for the stars.  It is what starry-eyed people from the 1960s see when they think about what JFK said about going to the moon.

“ This is a breathtaking pace, and such a pace cannot help but create new ills as it dispels old, new ignorance, new problems, new dangers. Surely the opening vistas of space promise high costs and hardships, as well as high reward.
So it is not surprising that some would have us stay where we are a little longer to rest, to wait. But this city of Houston, this State of Texas, this country of the United States was not built by those who waited and rested and wished to look behind them. This country was conquered by those who moved forward…” JFK September 12th, 1962.

Forward. To a country that is not ruled by the billionaire class.  Forward to a country where a medical diagnosis doesn’t demand that you sell your house to pay for treatments. Forward to a time when a country doesn’t go to war unless they can pay to take care of the veterans that come home.  Forward to a country whose children can boast of the best education without the mountain of debt.  Forward.
Even Rome in the 1300s understood forward. They built a cathedral in Florence for which they had no idea how to design or build the dome.  For a hundred years it stood with the certainty that it would be built and finally in 1436, a man by the the name of Filippo Brunelleschi engineered and built the dome on what would become the most renowned cathedral in Florence, Italy. Now that is some serious faith.

There are any number of people that will say, “It isn’t possible!”  “It will NEVER, EVER happen!”.  Maybe that is true, but that very thought would have kept the U.S. on the ground in the 1960s, we would have never gone to the moon.  That thought would have torn down the sides of the cathedral decades before the engineer that would eventually build it would even be born.  

It is so easy to give up.  It is, after all, what they want us to do….stay poor, stay dumb, stay sick, stay anesthetized by the latest reality T.V. spectacle while they quietly take away our liberties, our healthcare, our young men to wars to defend their oil interests in the Middle East.  

I say rise up.  Enough is enough.  

So, Dear Hillary supporter, you have before you a populace that is very much awake and aware. Most of us are, for the first times in our lives, really politically involved and energized.  We are not upset with you and your choice of candidate, but we sincerely hope that you can come to understand, if not respect, the anger that many of us are feeling at being duped for so long by the “system” of which Hillary is still very much a part.  “Forward” sometimes requires a push….that is what Bernie (and his supporters) are doing.   Sometimes we are loud and obnoxious, sometimes we post too many Bernie related things to our Facebook pages, sometimes we feel it necessary to point out the differences between the two democratic candidates in such a way that we appear to be attacking Hillary (and there are differences), but it comes down simply to what Martin Luther King Jr so eloquently expressed: “Human progress is neither automatic nor inevitable... Every step toward the goal of justice requires sacrifice, suffering, and struggle; the tireless exertions and passionate concern of dedicated individuals.” and we are those dedicated individuals.

Civil Disobedience and Fearlessness

I wonder what Thoreau would say about today's political/environmental/social situation?  Probably just what he wrote about the Mexican war and slavery in his own time.

"A minority is powerless while it conforms to the majority; it is not even a minority then; but it is irresistible when it clogs by its whole weight." - Thoreau 

Thoreau's writing of Civil Disobedience is what has led to countless non-violent revolutions around the world - Gandhi, King, , Apartheid in South Africa, anti-war demonstrations in the U.S. in the 70s...and it is what keeps the people camped out in tents at College Green in Iowa City in the Occupy movement.

This came up the other night because I was trying to explain to one of my children why we do what we do....it's a form of civil disobedience.  We don't necessarily break laws, but we don't really follow them either, at least with reference to the farm and what is considered "normal".

I waffle almost daily as to where I fit in to the socio/political scheme of things.  It used to be pretty simple....Democrat.  Now.....not so much.  The government has become too polarized and I don't think that enough of my ideas of what is right and good necessarily fit completely into only one category....nor should they.  For entirely too long we have tried to keep the two party thing working for us, but clearly it has ceased to work in any sense of the word.  For all intents and purposes, I am a free thinker.  I don't even like the word "independent" as it implies too much of a party and either the Democrats or Republicans work to coax the Independents into their camp to help achieve the majority.  I want the Independents to be the majority.  A majority of people that think for themselves and find someone electable without the input of corporate money and lobbyists.  Is that even possible anymore?

I saw a research study recently that was very interesting.  It examined the brains of members of the different parties and analyzed what part of the brain was used with relation to their political affiliation.  Liberal thinkers tend to have a larger anterior cingulate cortex, a region of the brain linked with monitoring uncertainty, which could help them cope with conflicting information. Conservatives, on the other hand, have a larger amygdala, an area linked with greater sensitivity to fear and disgust.

There seems to be a lot of "fear and disgust" being thrown around out there lately.  Turn on any T.V. talk show or listen for a few minutes to Fox news and you are made to feel the doom and gloom of the current administration.  I refuse to be this paralysed by fear.....but I am disgusted.  Disgusted that we are a people that are so quickly influenced by people who know how to use our fears to their best advantage. 

So, I stew about what to do.  Move away? - become an ex-patriot somewhere less stupid....less fearful? Or, do you dig in and try to make some kind of difference, however small.  So far, we have gone with the latter of those two options. 

My daughter was expounding the other day about what she wants to do when she grows up.  She wants to "do something"  not just sit around on a farm all day.  I tried to picture what she visualizes me "doing all day" from her 12 -year-old point of view, and granted....it didn't seem like much.  I go to work, I fix animals, I come home, weed things, write, read books, clean things....in short, a pretty quiet existence to a thrill-seeking tween. 

But, in the bigger picture, my husband and I are very busy....busy raising kids. Kids with the knowledge and understanding to be able to see what is going on around them in the world and possibly do something about it to make it a better place.  It is a very slow process to be sure, and often fret with more trials and tribulations than I like to recount, but we try to model for them what we hope will help them to "do something" later on in life- work ethic, patience, perseverance, deductive reasoning, equality, boldness....it is a tough job indeed. 

Of the things that we try to teach the kids, one of the hardest that I have found to teach is fearlessness.  "Don't be afraid."  How many times on dark, stormy nights have I said that to my kids and then found myself laying awake at night with the fear of what the world will eventually become for them.  But fear begets fear and it only paralyses, and it makes us unable to look at a situation rationally and act appropriately.

I remember being a kid and being afraid.  I was afraid of the bogey man that my brother swore lived behind the garage.  I was afraid that the house would catch fire at night and we would all be burned to a crisp in our beds.  I was afraid of being kidnapped because of my mother's constant warnings against "stranger danger".  I was afraid the world was going up in a blast of nuclear energy.   As a kid, you learn fear early and well.  The hard part is un-learning it.  And the even harder part is trying to help your kids unlearn it as well.  What I have come to understand through all the un-learning, is that the opposite of fear is not bravery - that is facing something despite the fact that you are still afraid.  The opposite of fear.....is knowledge. 



So, maybe we are hard wired to be what and who we are, or maybe it is learned from years of our parents teaching us not to talk to stranger danger.  The research study itself wasn't so sure which came first - the fear and then the conservatism or the conservatism and then the fear, but I don't think that we can stand to be stuck in this muddy government anymore, which brings me to another thought...

"...let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance." 

-Franklin D. Roosevelt

Personally, I wish he could address that speech again to this nation of prime time, news program zombies that believe every horror story that they hear and then take that fear to the bank and proceed to tear the country asunder with their hatred of all things new and different.

I think the main thing that has conservative people upset about the whole occupy and civil disobedience thing is that it is out of the norm, it pushes the change forward, and for many people that movement of change is a frightening thing.  But it doesn't need to be if the fear can be un-learned. Civil disobedience requires fearlessness, it requires trust and it requires critical thinking.  I am hoping that maybe, by practicing as Thoreau suggested we can help our kids achieve a sense of fearlessness in this crazy world.   A little less of using the amygdala and a little more of using the anterior cingulate cortex would be good for us all.