There was a just one Bernie organizing meeting in the suburban Chicago village where I live. It was over near the high school my younger daughter once attended. Our village is comparatively affluent. Population breaks down as 74.2% White, 17.2% Asian, 5.4% Hispanic and 1% African-American. But moving past the crude demographic of race into equally interesting demographics, Bernie attracted a pretty diverse crowd to the meeting I attended last night.
Our group ran a wide age gamut. There were a couple of seniors, like me, already drawing Social Security and on Medicare, but our small group had someone from just about every younger age voting cadre, all the way down to a very young brand new voter who came with her middle-aged dad. I had expected some union people, but I was the only person, when we gave our roundtable introductions, who claimed any union ties, and mine are very long ago. I was also the only one claiming to be a veteran. Since I know how well Bernie does with union folks and his strengths with veterans, the absence of union folks and veterans in our little group didn't trouble me.
It was a white collar group, for sure, as one would expect in this village. Our hosts were an internal medicine physician with a local primary care practice and her husband, a long time political operative presently employed by an IRS 501(c)(3) organization to perform opposition research on GOP Presidential candidates. He presently spends lots of time in Iowa and New Hampshire and is the only person I've met who went to a Donald Trump speech and had a good reason to do so. I'm not sure how he took my joke that his job must be like being a swineherd. There were quite a few advanced degrees in the room and the group was generally well educated and well informed, but this was not an intellectual gathering.
One of the nicest parts of the evening was when everyone just sat together and each in turn talked about the journey that had brought them to that room on that night. Some had known about Bernie for years and others were wide eyed at their recent discovery that someone like Bernie could, poitically, even exist in this country. The excitement was understated, but palpable, all evening.
When Bernie's presentation, last night, got to the part where everyone is invited to volunteer to work for the campaign, using smart phones, it looked to me like everyone did. If that level of participation is at all reflective of what occurred in other meetings, then #Bernie2016 acquired a volunteer base numbering tens of thousands, in one night, of people all over the country, ready to organize work days, stuff envelopes, knock on doors, make phone calls and do all of the other heavy lifting of a grassroots political revolution. Now, all await contact from the campaign, to see how Bernie manages, if he manages, to harness the embodied energy of that kind of instant volunteer base. This strikes me as a huge early test of Bernie's campaign strategy and I have no idea how this will turn out. But I'm excited to find out.
The good doctor laid out a lovely snack spread, including a charming Feel the Bern American Flag Strawberry Shortcake which I found to be equally wonderful in the viewing and the eating. She is trying to keep her practice independent when the trend of corporate control of medicine threatens to overwhelm her. When I asked her whether this signaled the general Walmarting of American medicine she agreed enthusiastically.
The billionaire thugs who have appropriated almost all of America's wealth and now want to use it to buy our government, too, have stepped on lots of toes on the way to their obscenely stratospheric incomes and estates. In my little village, ten diverse people, a doctor, an organizer, a student, an office workers, a sociologist, a retiree, a homemaker, several millennials of various stripes, etc. met to make a commitment to themselves, one another and to America, to tell the billionaires that enough is enough and they can't have it all.