From a Sidewalk in April on C-SPAN

As a lapsed New Englander, I’ve known about Bernie Sanders being a politician from Vermont for as long as I can remember. Last April, while working from home on a Thursday, I saw a tweet he was announcing a bid for the presidency. I thought: Sanders? For President? This is going to be interesting…

I turned-on C-SPAN, called Alyson into the room, and we saw this:

It’s not every day a candidate announces their presidential bid on the sidewalk of what looks like a dog-park, but there you go. Sanders is different. What matters to most, doesn’t matter to him (or me, for that matter.)

Rather than mug for the cameras and gladhand the media, Bernie walked up to the podium, seemed surprised by how many people were there, and said:

“We don’t have an endless amount of time; I’ve got to get back…”

And then he thumbed backward at the Capitol over his shoulder, referring to the fact that he’s A Senator with Very Important Stuff To Do, implying that doing his job (working for the people of Vermont) was more critical than the announcement itself (it was/is).

I thought, “this is my guy.”

A lot’s happened since then. He was 40 points back. No one believed he had a chance. 2016 would be a Clinton coronation. Sanders kept pushing his message (you know the message — seriously, you know the message). He came to our city, met Michael Render (Killer Mike), ate at Busy Bee (have you?), nearly conquered Iowa, then won New Hampshire by 20+.

I might be one of the only white guys in Atlanta who doesn’t talk about how much I love Run The Jewels, but I respect Killer Mike and where he’s coming from. And it was his intro of Sanders at The Fox Theater (later that day) that turned my ear to think that Sanders might have a legitimate chance to win the nomination.

Killer Mike was the first person I heard draw the connection between this gawky Democratic-Socialist from Vermont & the revolutionary ideas rooted in Atlanta’s favorite son. MLK is remembered for the March on Washington (which Bernie attended) but toward the end of his life, his politics were so much more progressive than (just) Civil Rights.

I’ve always wanted to support a candidate who appeared to be running for the best reasons, rather than the most electable reasons, or (worse) to feed their own narcissism & ego. While working on Obama’s campaign in ‘08, we witnessed the dawning of something extraordinary, and like most, hoped One Guy Could Make A Difference, and he has (more & less).

But as a dad of two (childless in ’08) I want more for our country, and tonight, I learned that Eric Garner’s daughter wants more too:

(If you’re reading these words & haven’t clicked play, please do. I can wait.)

It’s tough to write anything after that, other than acknowledge Erica’s description of how the Sanders campaign allowed her to say what she wanted to say:

The Sanders team allowed me and my team full creative control of this video so this message is 100% my message and my views!

Tonight, on my way home from work, I swung by to pick-up the kids at day-care, and our daughter handed me this drawing:

It’s Black History Month. I asked her who the man in her drawing was, and she said, “His name is Michael — Michael X.”

She was half-right, which makes a father proud, and it made me think back to the weekend, and the ridiculous backlash surrounding a half-time performance at a football game, particularly when dancers assembled into this formation:

While watching the game, I was sitting next to my mom, a New Englander for real, and we’d been blabbing about Bernie & Hillary all weekend: how Steinem and Albright were going too deep; how the misplaced fears of “but Sanders won’t get anything through Congress” could just as easily be placed on Secretary Clinton.

My mom’s not one for booty-shakin’, and I told her I’m not Beyonce’s biggest fan, but I appreciate how someone with her star-power (a la Killer Mike) was finally becoming political, and how that’s always a good thing for culture. Every performance becomes a teachable moment. Those kind of moments freeze frivolity and have the chance to move mountains.

All of this led me to remember a night in 2008, in South Carolina, when Alyson and I watched Barack Obama address the crowd in Columbia after he won the primary, and we couldn’t believe the stunned faces alongside us in the press box — it was all too unreal. This was really happening.

This election cycle, we’ve heard that the upcoming primary in South Carolina is Secretary Clinton’s “firewall”. That Hillary and Bill have worked long and hard to establish unassailable rapport with the African-American community, and no one is going to take that away from her.

She’s entitled to it. Those votes are hers, right?

I’ll never forget some of the things I heard Bill say about Obama on the campaign trail in 2008, and I’m sure the Clintons will uncork the cannons on Sanders in days to come. While that kind of fighting is the unfortunate pulse of politics, it completely misses the point about what’s needed now.

While I could tell you what’s needed, it wouldn’t differ from what any other Sanders fan is lobbing onto your Facebook feed.

Listen to Erica Garner. Listen to Bernie and do a google image search and find the newspaper article where he was arrested in Chicago as a 21 year old for fighting for what was right. Listen to Belafonte, who urges people to reconsider Bernie and his message. Know that the Congressional Black Caucus didn’t endorse Hillary this week, it was the Congressional Black Caucus Political Action Committee…

Or listen to Killer Mike, who said he decided to support Bernie while “smoking a joint and reading his tweets”. While that might not be your bag of tea (or my mom’s) I realized that Killer Mike and I had more in common than I thought; every single tweet I’ve seen from Bernie Sanders since April has been a position I agreed with and could believe in. Like this, selected at random:

In the last few months, I’ve considered writing something in favor of Senator Sanders for our We Are The 15% project, for which there’s an engaged community, and a decent-sized audience. Alyson rightly discouraged me, not because Senator Sanders isn’t the best choice, but because that’s not the project’s aim.

But I realized, after tonight, with nine days left to South Carolina and the cavalcade of “SEC primaries”, I needed to sketch-out why I’ll be supporting Senator Sanders, even if I never got around to talking about any of his policies; a fatal flaw, but I got kids to put to bed!

Keep your ears up. Listen to which candidate talks about “I” and “me”, and which candidate talks about “you”, “we” & “us”.

There’s something happening, and I think we’ll begin to know exactly what it is when South Carolina goes to the polls. We just might get a glimpse of what it could mean to start re-constructing our democracy into something that’s truly “of the people, by the people, for the people.”

It’s an idea that may not have perished after all…