No question about it. Being Jewish. The loss of family, including children my own age, in the Holocaust. The rise to power of a right-wing lunatic in a free election in Germany. A war that killed 50 million people, including more than one-third of all Jews on the planet. All of this had an indelible impact upon my life and thinking.
The opening pages set the stage for what is to come: an outline and explanation of the political agenda and ideology of Bernie Sanders. The book opens by describing the small Brooklyn apartment in which he grew up then quickly moves to the first of many impressionable events which impacted his mode of thought. That first major impact of the world outside his home was watching a parade celebrating the end of the World War II which leads to personal memories of how events far away in Europe made their presence known even within that little apartment.
O’Malley’s devastating decision to rip the Dodgers out of Brooklyn in order to pursue greater profits on the West Coast was, I suspect, one of my first observations regarding the deficiencies of capitalism.
Another major earth-shattering event which profoundly impact the future Senator and Presidential candidate was the sudden, soul-sucking loss to Los Angeles of Brooklyn’s beloved baseball bums, the Dodgers. Every kid who has grown up supporting a local professional sports team experiences an inexpressible sense of loss when that team decides to relocate. It is one of things which can unite people of every race, religion, ethnicity, political ideology and sport. Some kids, however, are able to intuitively look beyond the immediate emotionalism of the moment to penetrate to the larger meaning at play. Walter O’Malley’s decision to move the Dodgers from Brooklyn to Los Angeles made irrefutable business sense, of course, but it doesn’t take being a kid to realize that capitalism is a system where profits for some come at the expense of others. The socialist would ask a question: why not just have teams in both Los Angeles and Brooklyn?
While Republicans and representatives of the insurance and pharmaceutical industries tell us that we have the “greatest” health care system in the world, that is nonsense. Our current system is the most expensive, bureaucratic, wasteful, and ineffective in the world.
Sanders points out one of those paradoxes of politics never seem to register with a great many people. The truth, of course, is that it is not just GOP politicians who love to respond to criticism of the U.S. health care system when compared to other countries with the insistence that it is the best there is only to go on the campaign trail and scurry for votes by complaining about how broken it is. It literally cannot be both the best and broken to the point of needing widespread repair at the same time. The problem—and this is especially a Republican issue—is that denying America’s health care system is the greatest in the world would by definition mean saying it was inferior to a socialized medicine program since every other contender for best health care system in the world has rejected the American system and adopted the socialized method of delivery.
The more serious crisis is the limitation of our imaginations. It is falling victim to an incredibly powerful establishment—economic, political, and media—that tells us every day, in a million different ways, that real change is unthinkable and impossible. That we have got to think small, not big That we must be satisfied with the status quo. That there are no alternatives.
The philosophical essence—distilled from the specifics of proposals, agenda, policies and plans—is encapsulated in this quote. All the individual problems that the politics of Bernie Sanders addresses—health care, education, immigration, climate change—are like symptoms of a disease. Addressing and controlling a single symptom does not cure the disease. The disease at hand is the combination of apathy, ignorance, gullibility and distraction that deters any attempts at enacting change even before it has even begun. The message of the corrupt is clear: the best way to maintain a corrupt system isn’t to stop efforts to change it, but to convince people it can never be changed.
