He alluded to this reality in his talk in Arizona when he said, again to loud cheers:
"Everybody here understands one important historical fact, and that is change -- real change -- never takes place from the top on down. It always, it always takes place from the grassroots on up. Workers, a hundred plus years ago said they would not be treated like animals, and they struggled and went to jail and were beaten up in order to form unions and get collective bargaining. That's how we fight for workers' rights. For hundreds of years African Americans and their white allies struggled together to end racism and bigotry and segregation in America. Those changes did not take place from the top on down. It was blacks and whites standing together and saying we will not accept racism in the United States of America. People forget, but a hundred years ago, women in America did not have the right to vote, could not get the education they wanted, could not do the jobs they wanted. But what happened is that people looked around and said, hey, in America we will not accept women being treated as second-class citizens. It's gonna change! If we were in this room seven years ago, and somebody had said you know what, I think gay marriage will be legal in every state in this country by 2015, nobody would have believed it. But it happened, and it happened because the gay community and their straight allies said that in America people have the right to love whoever they want. If we were in this room five years ago, and somebody jumped up and said you know Bernie, I think this $7.25 minimum wage is a starvation wage. We gotta raise it to $15 an hour!, the person next to him would have said you're nuts! You're wanting to double the minimum wage. That's crazy! Can't happen. Well you know what happened? Fast-food workers at McDonalds and Burger King went out on strike. They stood up and fought back? And then you know what happened? Seattle, $15 an hour. San Francisco, Los Angeles $15 an hour. Oregon, $15 an hour. And that $15-an-hour movement is sweeping the country. But here is my point, the most important point: Do not settle for the status quo when the status quo is broken!"
Sanders clearly knows that it is this kind of political action in the streets that makes real "revolutionary" change, and it's getting harder and harder for me to imagine him, after building up that level of energy and support, just walking away from it after the convention in July and shilling for the likely winner. Hillary Clinton, after all, stands for all the things he has been denouncing for the whole primary season.
As he also said in his Arizona speech, which ran for an hour, "What I do not want to see are billionaires spending unlimited sums of money buying elections and undermining the democracy which has made our country so great." That of course is exactly what Hillary Clinton and her corporate backers have been doing for the past year or more, and it is what she will be doing, should she be the party's nominee, in the general election following the convention.
Here's hoping Sanders wins the nomination. And here's hoping that should he fail to win it, that instead of backing corporate hack Hillary Clinton, he chooses to criticize both candidates in the general election, and instead use the millions of dollars he has raised and the credibility he has established over the last 10 months to help convert the mass support base he has assembled (a third of whom according to polls say they will not vote for Clinton) into a mass movement for change operating outside of the electoral system and the terminally corrupted Democratic Party.
DAVE LINDORFF is a member of ThisCantBeHappening!, the collectively-run, uncompromised, five-time Project Censored Award-winning online alternative news site. His work, and that of colleagues JOHN GRANT, JESS GUH, GARY LINDORFF, ALFREDO LOPEZ, LINN WASHINGTON, JR. and the late CHARLES M. YOUNG, can be found at www.thiscantbehappening.net
(Article changed on March 17, 2016 at 11:12)
(Article changed on March 17, 2016 at 12:09)
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