With the first caucuses of 2020 kicking off just last week, and the first ballots from Colorado already being cast, many first time voters are looking for guidance. Well, look no further.
If you are a young person living in today’s society, I posit that it is your responsibility to vote for one Mr. Bernard Sanders. Senator Sanders has been a beacon of hope in a cesspit of incrementalist misery for his entire career. He has spent his life fighting for the disregarded and forgotten. He was arrested and beaten in Chicago protesting segregation in the 60s. Senator Sanders defended LGBTQ+ soldiers on the floor of the Senate in the ’80s. He was fighting to limit the suffering created by our for-profit healthcare system when he was just a mayor of the small city of Burlington Vermont. He spoke out against war crimes committed at the behest of American interests in Nicaragua when doing so would almost certainly end his career. For his entire life, Bernie has been a champion of moral and just governance even when it was unpopular. Martin Luther King once said that “The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.”
At a time when those in power have seemingly forgotten an entire generation, Sander’s qualities are a glimmer of hope in a world of darkness: a world where the future of humanity, our future, is sold off on a daily basis so that people at the top can live lives of comfortable excess. People have no problem trading the lives of both the poor workers of the exploited world and the lives of their own countrymen to maintain their hegemonic dominance.
I beg you, do not fall for those who have attempted to paint themselves as freedom fighters, but in reality, they are the very boot on the neck of the American people. Do not give yourselves to brutes who despise you, who treat you as cannon fodder. Do not accept those who tell you that a better world is not possible, or that it will take far too much time to create. Their power is predicated on your inactivity. The very nature of their power requires you to be a passive observer to a world on fire. If you truly care, then do not trade your ideals for the false security of a “sure-fire” victory in November. There is power in the people of this great nation. It has been asleep for far too long, but this November, when given the choice between justice and cronyism, modernity and barbarism, prosperity and poverty, democracy and authoritarianism, I believe that the soul of our nation shall make the right choice.