[This was originally posted among people who’d volunteered for Sanders in support of arguments to vote for Clinton. I’m confused at the comments here which universally seem to have read it backwards from how it was intended and read elsewhere.]
People who tried to get someone with more integrity elected in the primary all deserve more hugs and less screaming at each other if we disagree about what the next steps are. But personally, I think that a lot of us are in the denial stage when we refuse to vote for Clinton: we lost the primary, that really really really sucks. We know how much cheating happened, and nothing good in history has ever faced *less* cheating -- abolition was a war, women's suffrage had imprisonment, Civil Rights faced dogs and murder, and we faced the DNC saying mean things about our candidate. Sanders has proven that taking over a party is possible, we nearly did it the first time we got half-serious (less than 12 months of effort!) and tried. The Green Party and a couple hundred years of history indicates that third parties often defeat their own causes, and are likely to Animal Farm if they win ... if you can't take over the Democratic Party, you won't be able to defend the Green Party if it starts winning and attracts all the career politicians. Clinton is vastly better than Trump. It reduces Sanders to forget that he is unusual, that the world isn't even supposed to hand us people who get into politics but have their egos under control and super-clean and honest ... it's our job to convince our neighbors, to make it possible for people like Sanders to win, we haven't done that yet.
All the thoughts about being angry that we lost and taking out that anger, I think it distracts us from realizing how close we came and what we need to do — who we need to connect with — to move forward next time.