Bernie Sanders: America's 'other radical'

[Donkees]

2017-09-01 08:00


Excerpts:

Like great orators such as Dr Martin Luther King, President Nelson Mandela and Archbishop Desmond Tutu before him, the longest serving independent member of the United States Congress’ voice echoes against the walls and roof of the highest church in America as he rallies to rouse young Americans to free themselves of a “corrupt political system.”

Sanders elicits the fiercest applause when, in his booming voice and Brooklyn accent, he waxes “radical.”

“The hardest part of politics, and something that Dr King Jr certainly knew, has to do with courage, has to do with imagination, has to do with the need to think big and not small. It has to do with the need to escape the limitations and constraints of the status quo.”

“It has to do with the need to reject as ‘normal’ what we see every day around us, it has to do with the need to maintain a deep sense of outrage at what we see around us in this country and in the world.”

“It has to do with the need to understand that the emperor, in fact, has no clothes.”

Courage. Outrage. These two words evoke an immediate and passionate response from the audience.

http://www.news24.com/Columnists/GuestColumn/bernie-sanders-americas-other-radical-20170831

[beam me up scottie]

1. I like how he embraces the word 'radical' when others use it to slur the left.

Arguably, nothing Sanders says to a thundering applause in this church on the edge of Harlem in New York could be conceived of as radical – and yet, it is with the notion of radicalism that political pundits equate his leftist ideologies, as well as discredit him.

But his ideas, his challenging statements and the rhetorical questions asked with a crooked finger and an air of incredulous annoyance, are not new.

Their foundations are in the United States Constitution, in speeches by prominent figures like Dr King and past presidents, in Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address: “Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”