I’ve known my adopted older child since age three days and stayed with her continuously during her first six weeks of life (except that one time I had to go to the State Capitol to hold a press conference and left her for two hours with a very close friend). She is the very personification of diversity in America, with associations and connections that acknowledge none of the conventional lines we know in society.
She called to tell me she had early-voted for Bernie Sanders in the Democratic Primary in Austin, Texas where she teaches in a public school. Born in Ronald Reagan’s America, she grew up in Oklahoma and Texas watching her parents support Bill and Hillary through all that. She was already all in for Bernie months ago when I first asked her about the election. I asked if many of her friends had gone to Bernie’s Austin event and she said that, according to her Facebook, yes.
My other adult daughter, five years younger, Native American Chickasaw, and also adopted, explains her intention to vote for Bernie in the Illinois Democratic Primary in terms of her loathing for Hillary Clinton. She never got it from us, though I may have bad mouthed HRC a little during the 2008 Primary; I supported Obama. But rest assured that the kid didn’t listen to anything else her mom and dad said when she was that age. Still, she is decidedly more working class in outlook than her older sister, Occupy came along at an important time of her life. Maybe that’s part of it. This daughter, who has suffered a lifetime of health problems, now facing treatment for liver disease, has only remained insured, so far, because of Obamacare, so there is that. Bernie certainly offers much better future healthcare security for those at the fringes of the bottom, where she sometimes perceives herself to be.
The future is what our family has been all about, since we first put it together after a 14 year marriage without the children we wanted. This family was built to look toward the future and build upon the past. Little wonder that we all Feel the Bern.