BY ED FELIEN
It’s amazing!
The excitement that has been generated, the wildly enthusiastic crowds, the steady increase in Bernie’s popularity in the polls, all are testament to a massive popular support for democratic socialism.
Who would have thought it?
Just a few months ago, early last spring, Bernie was meeting with a few students in the lunchroom at the University of Iowa. It seemed pathetic and doomed. How could anything come from a cranky old man from Vermont with a Brooklyn accent talking socialism to young college students? And, yet, from those early conversations a revolution has begun.
Bernie talks about free health care for everybody, free college tuition, free childcare and taxing the billionaires. He talks about these ideas as if they were the basic rights and responsibilities of a just and humane society.
But it’s not much of a revolution if he’s the only one talking about it, and the rest of us are just cheering in the crowd. That’s not democracy, and that’s not socialism.
If we support Bernie Sanders and democratic socialism, then we have a responsibility to bring it all back home.
Do our state representatives and state senators support Single Payer health care? Do they support free tuition at community colleges? Do they support free daycare?
Do our City Council members support public ownership of the electric company? Do they support public ownership of basic utilities? Will they prosecute banks that discriminate in lending practices against minorities?
If we support Bernie Sanders then these are legitimate questions that we should ask candidates for the State Legislature and the City Council.
In the next few months Southside Pride will publish a questionnaire that we will submit to candidates in our area.
We have a right to know where they stand.
