Do or Do Not...but Don't Just Watch
Sanders addresses the issue of hope and possibility; of dreams and accomplishments. He expresses a confidence that change can be enacted upon the basis of hope, that event the wildest dreams can become actual accomplishments. There is one real caveat that matters: no one scored a Super Bowl touchdown or hit a World Series-winning home run from the stadium seats.
“We will not be able to accomplish those goals if we look at democracy as a spectator sport, assuming others will do it for us.”
A Quaint Simile
This book was published just a week after the 2016 elections. In it Sanders uses a simile to describe a situation which seemed to him bizarre and outside the conventions of normalcy. Just a couple of years later, the use of this particular simile to describe that particular situation has come to seem almost quaint in light of the events to which it would be much more applicable since then:
“Unfortunately, virtually all of the questions we received from the national media were about the campaign. Almost nothing about poverty. There was virtually no national coverage about the issues we had discussed. It was like living in a parallel universe.”
The Making of an Anti-Capitalist
Not all is strictly politics in this memoir, although everything touches upon in some manner. Sanders speaks of growing up in Brooklyn as one of many countless residents whose heart was broken and soul shattered as a result of one of the most infamous profit-based decisions in mid-20th century American history:
“The departure of the Dodgers, orchestrated by O’Malley, the team owner, was devastating to the borough and to the city. It left a gaping hole.”
The Eruption of a Capitalist
If the economics of baseball was a driving force behind the disgust with capitalism which characterizes the career of Sanders before running for President, then the act of running for President seems to have made him at least a little more open to its possibilities. The campaign’s success in selling election-related stuff becomes a source of great irony for a campaign decrying the effects of companies selling so much stuff:
“..for a while, I believe we were the major source of business for union-made T-shirts in the United States...We had unleashed an entrepreneurial volcano.”
Wall Street
Sanders has many bad things to say about Wall Street that are quite literal. And while all of those literal facts are true, making the criticism justified and necessary, perhaps the single most accurate observation he makes about the epicenter of the financial world is not literal but figurative. The metaphor engaged is perfectly apt and really does put the whole financial market apparatus into stark focus that is sublime in its simplicity. Wall Street, Sanders asserts, is nothing more nor less than:
“the largest unregulated gambling casino in the history of the world”
