Been through some rough primary wars here. To me now, though, this one is different.

[PatrickforO]

48. As to hating the Democratic Party, I don't. I just hate what it has become.

I also hate what the Republican Party has become. A reading today of Ike's brilliant 1963 essay titled, "Why I'm a Republican" will make you sick when you look at the 21st century GOP. And somehow the Democrats got away from their ideals - the same ideals that took this country out of the great Depression, through the second world war and beyond into that period called the 'great prosperity' where we actually had policies that built up the middle class by ensuring that wealth was distributed more evenly; workers were protected by strong unions, and people could actually make ends meet.

Somehow, those ideals became objects of ridicule. The idea of caring for each other became 'everybody needs to pull himself up by his bootstraps' and 'why should I pay for her mistakes?' The Democratic ideals were attacked on 1,000 different fronts by splinter crazies and big corporatists.

The encouraging thing is that many thought leaders are now seeing that the brutal neoliberal capitalist model that seems to have taken over the world is unsustainable. These blind capitalists are literally destroying our world to make a profit, and the current Wall Street philosophy of the primacy of shareholders has driven workers almost to economic ruin and so hurt our environment - the very world on which we live and depend - that it may be decades or even centuries before it can recover.

The thing that made me the SICKEST of all, was when Democratic candidates throughout the nation distanced themselves from Obama. When Alison Lundergan Grimes would NOT answer the question of whether she voted for Obama, I almost puked! No wonder she lost. I got a few surveys after our party suffered the Great Pasting in 2014, and what I said was that people did not vote Democratic because it was very difficult to know what they stood for, if anything, because they waffled so much. Own your positions, I told them! Health care IS a basic right. We need to get our troops OUT of all these middle eastern places and STOP the drone attacks! This TPP is yet another NAFTA - it will cost America hundreds of thousands of jobs and compromise our environment and worse, it will subordinate the will of the American people to the will of big multinational corporations.

Yes, there's lots wrong. That's why I'm for Bernie Sanders, but I'm not naïve enough to think he can make huge changes unless we ALSO elect a bunch of real progressives to Congress. The truth is that it's going to take years to bring America back, and it may not happen. Fortunately, much is being done at the local level: slow money, slow food, micro-lending and employee owned enterprises.

Still, it seems as of our species is in a race for its very survival - and there can be only one winner - the progressives, who actually want to set up a society that promotes social, economic and environmental justice. The problem is if we lose this race, then EVERYONE on the whole planet will lose, too.