I’ve seen some diaries recently where some younger, passionate advocates of Bernie have been accused of, God help us, privilege. Not everyone, even us olds, is calling out privilege. I do believe, though, that those who have life experiences covering the last 25 years or so may believe the society we have today is “normal”. It’s not. We’ve come a long way in the last 60 years and thus we have a long way to fall: coat hanger abortions, Dr. King, Bobby Kennedy, JFK, Chicago Democratic convention, Bull Connor, Kent State, Orangeburg, women as tranquilized chattel, 1952 before we had a year with zero lynchings, Stonewall, Compton’s cafeteria, Frank Reynolds giving the Nam body counts on Friday nights, the Hays Code, pools being emptied and sheets burned in Vegas, being required to recite the Lord’s Prayer in class every day (Arkansas to the the Supreme Court: fuck you), imprisonment, forced castration, electroshock and other “treatments” for homosexuality, nuclear brinksmanship in Cuba, etc., etc., fricking etc. This isn’t some semi-mythical dead white male textbook stuff: this shit really happened.
Some younger (to me) diarists, possibly in response to being tagged with The Privilege, have done an excellent job of sharing not just their views on this election, but their life context leading up to their position, and I think it’s important to share the context of at least one HRC supporter. Maybe I’m a dinosaur, but with the republican candidates of 2016 I see and hear George Wallace. Strom Thurmond. Eugene McCarthy. I see Bull Connor, fire hoses and dogs. I see the abuse of and ghettoization of my gay uncle. I remember the constant sound of B52s overhead during the Cuban thing (carrying “strategic weapons”). I remember my draft lotto number. I remember the good Baptist girls that “went to Memphis” to have certain things taken care of. And how the girls that didn’t or couldn’t afford to take care of things were forced to drop out of school. I remember what we’d now consider child abuse being so common that, when I tell someone my own age about my experience of abuse I frequently get a “who wasn’t”. I remember 1968, the year that the wheels came off.
Up until this election I thought a loss to the republicans would be bad, but not catastrophic. And I strongly supported John Edwards and his populist message, despite the “risky position” it put him in. I’m glad to see Bernie is keeping the message alive and fresh. This time, though, it’s different. A loss this time could roll back most or all of those 60 years of gains. I’m not inferring this--the republican candidates are fricking promising it. But it’s not the insanity and sociopathy of the republican candidates that scares me, it’s the fact that 40+ percent of the voters approve of these hateful, batshit crazy people. It’s never been this way in my lifetime. Never. I’ve never seen the overt hatred, the childishness, the bloodlust, groups with assault weapons strutting around intimidating anyone they don't approve of, and the complete, smug, virtuous for God’s sake, lack of any humanity in that 40+ percent. It’s been there, under the surface, with some. But it’s never been roused and focused like it is now.
I took a principled stand in 2008, at least until John’s trouser malfunction. Now, maybe I’m just old, scared, prone to hysteria, whatever, but I’m convinced the Dems must win this election. I’m for whoever can win this thing, even if they’re within a fraction of a percent of the other candidate. For various reasons, irrelevant to this diary, I’ve concluded that person is HRC. IMHO though, in the big scheme of things, it really doesn’t fricking matter. We must retain our social gains from the last 60 years and we must pursue a populist evolution, and that’s only going to happen under a Dem administration and a progressive SCOTUS. Pressure can be brought on whichever Dem wins the election. The republicans aren’t going to give a fuck. Not a single fuck. And, selfishly, I suspect I won’t live long enough to see us recover from a 2016 loss.