To my fellow BernieBros

The loss in New York is tough to stomach, but let’s keep perspective.

Last night was rough and uneventful. Less than an hour after New York’s polls closed, NBC called victory for Hillary Clinton. Bernie Sanders, the implausible contender, still has a shot at the Democratic nomination, but losing the modern and “with it” New York felt like a cold shower. For Hillary Clinton to lose now, it’ll take a historic slip up or controversy.

Either way, Bernie’s surprising popularity shows there’s real potential for an end to neoliberalism’s reign at the center of American politics. Millions of people are excited about things that have been very uncool for decades: government, higher taxes for the wealthy, and universal programs.

But it’s only “potential” because a true overthrow of neoliberalism — of capitulating to austerity, and of using markets to (try to) make up for the resulting social/racial/economic injustice — will require the everyday work of organizing power for the working class and marginalized. Organizing power in this way (unions, community organizations, co-ops, etc.) is foreign to many of us for reasons having to do with the particular arc of American history and when we were born into it. But we must try, while never forgetting that it takes time and space for folks to wake up to their own power and how and where it fits into collective action.

This bit of wisdom about politics from Rev. angel Kyodo williams — a Zen monk and deep river of wisdom — should help us along that path:

“We run out into the world wanting to fix things with no sense of the need to release the outcomes, so that the outcomes can reveal themselves, so that the fruit of our labor can reveal itself. It’s the tragedy, really, of our social change sensibilities and our progressive sensibilities. Because, just like in formal [meditation] practice, if you have nothing but effort, nothing but practice, nothing but pushing, nothing but applying yourself, the grasping ego that compels you gets all the room–the grasping ego that is driving you toward accomplishment, that’s driving you toward, I’m going to be a good meditator; I’m going to be a good yogi, is getting center stage. And there’s no room for the antidote of non-attachment to also come up and feed into the system–into, frankly, this insidious way of releasing outcomes–thereby keeping the force, the attachment to force, in check, in balance.”

Wondering what a “BernieBro” is? Here’s the original post that started it all.

This post first appeared on futuredebris.com.

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