BY ED FELIEN
Is the nightmare over?
Have the plague and pestilence gone?
Have we buried the dead?
No, the nightmare is not over. The madman still runs the White House.
The plague and pestilence have not gone because there is no leader to rid the land of plague and pestilence.
And we will continue to bury the dead.
But, as Emily Dickinson says,
“Hope is the thing with feathers –
That perches in the soul –
And sings the tune without the words –
And never stops – at all- ”
And we continue to hope.
The Democratic National Convention gave us glancing moments of hope for a new government.
The Democratic Party is a big tent, but there are two major groupings: the bourgeois liberals and the progressive radicals. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the leader of the radicals, ran against one of the most powerful liberal members of Congress and won. Ilhan Omar, a member of The Squad led by AOC, was challenged in her primary by Antone Melton-Meaux, representing the liberal wing. In the City of Minneapolis Omar beat him in every neighborhood except the very richest ones in the Southwest corner near Edina and around Lake of the Isles. This bodes well for challenges to the liberal mayor and City Council in next year’s municipal election.
AOC nominated Tio (Uncle) Bernie for President:
“Good evening, bienvenidos, and thank you to everyone here today endeavoring towards a better, more just future for our country and our world.
“In fidelity and gratitude to a mass people’s movement working to establish 21st century social, economic, and human rights, including guaranteed health care, higher education, living wages, and labor rights for all people in the United States; a movement striving to recognize and repair the wounds of racial injustice, colonization, misogyny, and homophobia, and to propose and build reimagined systems of immigration and foreign policy that turn away from the violence and xenophobia of our past; a movement that realizes the unsustainable brutality of an economy that rewards explosive inequalities of wealth for the few at the expense of long-term stability for the many, and who organized an historic, grassroots campaign to reclaim our democracy.
“In a time when millions of people in the United States are looking for deep systemic solutions to our crises of mass evictions, unemployment, and lack of health care, and espíritu del pueblo and out of a love for all people, I hereby second the nomination of Senator Bernard Sanders of Vermont for president of the United States of America.”
What about Bernie? Does Bernie support Joe Biden and the rest of the Democratic Party ticket:
“My friends, I say to you, to everyone who supported other candidates in the primary and to those who may have voted for Donald Trump in the last election: The future of our democracy is at stake. The future of our economy is at stake. The future of our planet is at stake. We must come together, defeat Donald Trump and elect Joe Biden and Kamala Harris as our next president and vice president. My friends, the price of failure is just too great to imagine.”
And Tom Friedman in his column in the New York Times said, “Personally, I will walk, I will jog, I will skip, I will crawl, I will slither, I will bike, I will hike, I will hitchhike, I will drive, I will ride, I will run, I will fly, I will roll, I will be rolled, I will be carried, I will trek, I will train, I will trot, I will truck, I will strut, I will float, I will boat, I will ramble, I will amble, I will march, I will bus, I will taxi, I will Uber, Lyft, scooter, skateboard or motorcycle—and I will wear a face mask, a face shield, gloves, goggles, a hazmat suit, a spacesuit or a wet suit—but I damn well will get to my neighborhood polling station to see that my vote for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris is cast and counted.”
