A Place of Integrity: Thy Name is Bernie Sanders

Bernie Sanders holds a place in my heart reserved for my grandfather and his plain-spoken integrity.  On MSNBC and in interviews over the last months, Bernie is led in question to criticize Hilary Clinton.  He refuses.  In Iowa, August 16, Bernie rebutted a Washington Post reporter by telling him that he would not participate in "that sport you like."

This is the appeal of Bernie Sanders. When I see and hear Bernie Sanders speak, there is a longing, and a feeling for a time and place when people dealt with each other on a more honest level.  I am tired of slick politics.  I am sick of the hate-filled double speak and fact-free rhetoric that infects our society and turns us upon each other.

I work with young kids.  Often houses built from blocks by a child will be kicked over by another, more aggressive child.  I then sit down with them both and we work on how we can rebuild together.

There are many things that need to be rebuilt in this country.  Bernie Sanders will spur the creation of jobs to rebuild our roads and bridges.  But that is just the physical.  There is far more that has to be rebuilt in this country and that is the American spirit.

There is so much that has been kicked over.  It is our economic certainty.  We now worry if our children can ever afford college and worry if paying for food outweighs paying for heating this month.  How did we sink to this?

It is our dignity in the American workplace that has been kicked over.  We have lost that can-do American spirit from years of abuse at the hands of corporations who hold the strings to our government.  That proud slogan of Made in America?  How often do you see that?

Our indignity encompasses low wages and abusive hiring practices.  Our abuse encompasses routinely being sent to sign up for food stamps, no paid vacations or sick days, no payment of overtime and workers being locked into workplaces.  All this has kicked over our home built of trust, our home built on security, and we see our future turning to rubble of which there is no way to dig ourselves out.

This is America and we are a great country full of great people.  We are diverse.  We believe different things.  Bernie Sanders is the only candidate not bought and paid for by the corporate machine.  What Bernie Sanders is doing is bringing us together and bringing our focus back to our basic needs which are not those of giant corporations, but the needs of We the People.

The reason Bernie Sanders is pulling record crowds is that we are realizing It Is Not Our Fault.  We have been brainwashed, slowly and effectively to forget the protection in the workplace afforded to our parents and grandparents.  We forget, as unions are demonized, the hard won benefits that made this country the most upwardly mobile society in history.  As wealth accumulates at the top, our ability to move up the income ladder has degraded considerably, and entire rungs of the ladder are missing as we dangle precariously above a pit called economic despair, and yes, homelessness. 
We are told to blame ourselves.

Bernie Sanders speaks to this despair.  He does not believe families should work full-time and have to resort to food stamps.  He does not believe families should struggle just to afford childcare costs.  He states that it is a moral outrage that any American go without healthcare.  He believes a higher education should be within reach of every American.

Healthcare, childcare, education, and a living wage, these are the building blocks of society.  We are rebuilding America anew and Bernie Sanders is the voice of each and every one of us.

Body Politics

I have always thought my legs were fat.
Athletic to be more charitable.
Recently I was wearing dark wash skinny jeans and playing with a 5 year old boy.  At some point he exclaimed, "Your legs are skinny!"
I blurted out, "I love you!  That's the BEST thing anyone has ever said to me!"
Oh God help me.  If this had been a girl, I know this would be an issue and a scar for the rest of her life.  At 5, the girls at my preschool are already comparing who is thinner.
As it is, my loss of control did not help this boy in anyway.  The thing is, I didn't know what to say afterward to mitigate the damage that had just flown out of my mouth.
I damaged him. I damaged future society.

I view my body through a lens of a male dominated and patriarchal society.  I grew up consuming the culture of fashion and Diet Pepsi.  I don't even know what it's like to view my body objectively.  Is any woman capable of that?  Is there some magical, mythical land called Body Acceptance?

At 2, I was voted the cutest little girl on Ramona Street in Palo Alto.  They somehow missed the future Nobel prize winner in biochemistry that lay latent within me.

Where is the line?  Where is the balance?  We love beautiful things.  At what point is appreciating someone's physical beauty corrosive?
 And then there is the measure and standard of beauty.  I read a great story by a large (for American standards) woman who constantly had to deal with dismissiveness and sometimes straight up hate towards her because of her weight.  She went to Jamaica and people would stop in the street to tell her how beautiful she was.  It was an eye-opening piece for me, this idea that beauty is a variable thing, based on a society's preference,

I had an experience on a MUNI bus in San Francisco.  I was coming home from working as a nanny.  My hair was up in a messy ponytail.  I had a zipped up hoody on, and I was wearing what I can only describe as really awful librarian glasses.  Three guys behind me started commenting in loud voices how ugly I was.  I casually took my ponytail out and shook out my hair.  I tied my hoody around my waist, I was wearing a tank top.  I threw my glasses into my backpack.  I had to walk past them to get off at my stop and as I did, one of them jumped up and followed me off the bus.  He began apologizing profusely for his friends as the bus drove away, saying they were drunk.  I didn't answer.  I didn't know what to say.  I just looked at him and walked away.

To this day, I don't know how to think about this event.  Why did I feel compelled to make myself  "prettier?"  What if I had been the age I am now?  What if I were 70?  If that would have happened now, how would I handle it?  I don't even know how to look at my body objectively.  I don't know what that is even like.  Is any woman capable of that?  Is there any woman out there who sees herself beautiful no matter her size or shape?

It starts so very very young for us.  I don't think I will ever get away from this damage and critical thinking.  I often tell girls how pretty and beautiful they are.  I feel they will not believe it of themselves if I do not tell them and reinforce it.  Am I helping?  Or am I hurting?

I have another troubling story to admit here.  I never thought that my mom was beautiful, or even pretty.  She would make disparaging comments about her own body and looks and I internalized that.  She said it was more important to be smart.
I did not believe her.

Soon after she died, I was in my Menlo Park business photoshopping a picture of her for my dad.  A co-worker wandered by and spontaneously exclaimed, "Your mother was beautiful!"  And suddenly I saw it.  My mother is beautiful. 
By anyone's standards, she was beautiful.  She was beautiful and I never saw it.
 Because of her words, I could not see it.

We can damage each other.  We can hurt each other.  We hurt ourselves by mutilating our bodies and risking death to obtain some elusive and unobtainable goal.

Acceptance.
I don't know how to do it.
I don't know how that feels.

All I know is I have to be careful with my words.  I have to be aware of what I say and how I speak of others and especially of how I speak about myself.

How Do We Talk To Our Replublican Friends About Bernie Sanders?:

*or*
(You disagree with me so by definition, YOU'RE WRONG!)

How do we talk to those whose ideals and values are very different from our own?
How do we talk about Bernie Sanders to those who jump to disagree?
How do we find common ground?

We don't have to convince those who agree with us, we have to persuade those who do not.
So how do we talk to a Republican?

We are all Americans.  This is our common ground.   One of the American values we hold high is family values.  We, as Americans, value the strength of family.  We value the ideal of our children achieving their goals, and of achieving more. We value education.  We value a family structure that if one or both parents are working, the family should not be struggling.  A strong family unit can only be strong if the basic needs are met.  If the parents are working, childcare should be in place and a family should not have to struggle to make that so.  I think we can agree on that.  There should be enough food for the family to eat.  I believe we agree on that.  The parents should be able to reasonably pay rent or mortgage without fear of losing their home if they, or one of their children fall ill.  This one, for whatever reasons, we struggle to agree upon.  But I think as Americans, we can agree that these values are a baseline.

Unfortunately this is not the America we are living in.  Parents working full-time must also receive food stamps.  It is shocking how many schools across this country feed meals to their students because entire communities are below poverty level.
These are not American values.  These are not Bernie Sanders' values.  Bernie Sanders wants to adjust the minimum wage to support a family in 2015 so they can depend upon their own income and are not routinely directed to receive social services by our own American corporations.

Republicans agree than an educated America is a strong America.  If our Republican friends are worried about our national security, then they will certainly agree that nothing is more important than a higher education.  Our first line of defense starts with our scientists, engineers, and mathematicians.  Our student loan system is predatory and corrosive.  Bernie Sanders advocates college affordability and a college education should not be out of the reach of anyone.

These are just a couple areas, that we, as Americans can find some common ground.

Here are some more thoughts of how we can talk about Bernie Sanders from my conversation with Colin Cole, Field Organizer for Bernie Sanders.  We met in a small Mason City, Iowa coffee shop.

 "Democracy, if it is working properly, is a good system.  It works.  The people. and what they want their government to do, should be relatively in sync.   So if the majority of your constituency  - whether that be in a city, or a state, or the United States - feels a certain way, in a democracy the government will represent those views, and the people will be satisfied."

Our democracy is not currently working and our voices are not being heard.  Colin went on to talk about how, yes, we each have one vote in the ballot box, but individuals can spend millions promoting their candidate, and attack others with influence that you and I will never have.  Thus my vote really does have less power when another's wealth can influence so many.

As Americans, if we can agree that a properly functioning democracy will lead to a good outcome, then our Republican friends should consider Bernie a "gateway" candidate, - whose goal is to fix the system-,  so that you and I will better have our voices heard, AND our Republican friends will have a better chance to elect the candidate of whom they really want and best represents their interests next time around.