Bernie, Brazil, and the Great Unknown
The courage to leap without promise
CBS News reporter Caitlin Huey-Burns sat down with classically suited-up-yet-somehow-still-disheveled Senator Bernie Sanders and asked him about his diagnosis of the Democratic leadership, under which 8 allies abandoned ship and voted for Trump’s budget bill.
Is Chuck Schumer still the man for the minority leader job?
Sanders briefly looked down, as if disappointed in the question, and then he responded with a heavy sigh in his tone.
“It’s not Schumer,” he said. “It goes deeper than Schumer.”
The reporter waited a beat, and he continued.
“It’s no secret to anyone who follows these things that there is a division within the Democratic Party. Okay?”
She nodded.
“Chuck represents the establishment wing, the corporate wing. Raises a lot of money, as do Republican leaders. They raise zillions of dollars from wealthy people and Super PACs, and all that stuff,” Sanders started to explain.
He went on.
“I represent a different wing in the Democratic Party. It’s the wing that Mamdani won within in New York City, and we are now supporting candidates all over this country—candidates for the Senate, candidates for the House—who are prepared to deal with this horrific level of wealth inequality. Prepared to deal with the fact that we are the only major country not to guarantee health care to all people. We have a terrible housing crisis. That we should not be giving a trillion dollars in tax breaks to the one percent.”
Satisfied that he set the stage, he moved to his point.
“So the question is: the future of the Democratic Party. I think it’s a future where you have candidates who are prepared to stand up to big money, represent the working class of this country and fight for an agenda that works for all, not just the one percent.”
The reporter wasn’t satisfied with this. What about what’s going on now, what about Schumer?
And Bernie gave the most unsatisfying answer that everybody needs to hear right now: “It is what it is.”
Change around the corner…somewhere!
As a people currently experiencing trauma at the hands of turbo-charged, greedy politicians and their corporate allies, we desperately need change to happen now. Actually, we needed it to happen yesterday.
To name a few things on our wish list this year, we need liveable paychecks, secure communities, and safeguarded civil rights. We need our forests to stop being demolished and abused. We need to feed ourselves and our families.
That’s just for starters.
We really need a renewal of our American Dream.
And as much as there is so much reason to believe that these things are in reach, what Bernie so succinctly illuminates is that they require us to venture into the great unknown.
We aren’t fighting to regain what we once had. We are demanding something more.
What he is saying is exhilarating and daunting at the same time: we don’t have the answers. Yet. We are making new solutions now, and we don’t know what they will look like.
So, why is this opaque idea of political evolution crucial for us to absorb now?
Because it has everything to do with how we see success going forward. It is key to being able to keep momentum going, despite disappointing setbacks and letdowns. It allows us to recognize progress toward our goals and weaknesses in the opposition to them.
Good COP30, Bad COP30
Earlier this week, I was listening with particular interest to a podcast covering COP30, the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Brazil, where the hosts were discussing the indigenous protests going on just outside its doors.
The hosts began by lauding Brazil’s unprecedented inclusion of 5,000 indigenous individuals. They spoke of the remarkable move to allocate a minimum of 20% of revenue from the summit toward indigenous and local communities in the Amazon. They also shared excitement about how those people were an engaged part of the planning process for the event.
Nothing like this had been endeavored in the history of the summit, and it is viewed with hope by many who were involved in making the shift.
Why then, are there mass protests and flotillas full of indigenous people who are vehemently against this conference and all that it stands for? In short, it isn’t enough. As much as it may acknowledge a flaw in the structure of COP30 (and the entities that put it there), it still misses the mark of making the changes people need.
To give a little background, COPs is the meeting which has been held every year for the last 30 years to make decisions about how to advance the Paris Agreement. It aims to include stakeholders from different sectors, and work together toward goals of lessening the degree of climate change and mitigating its effects.
And, like many other governing bodies formed under the auspices of capitalist growth, it focuses on economic and technological advances to further its goals.
Indigenous communicator Levi Tapuia explained that he and other protesters object to the slanted preference the energy industry is given compared to locals. Tapuia said, “big Brazilian corporations that finance everything are the ones sitting at negotiation tables to talk about environmental protection, even though they are the ones destroying it. It makes no sense.”
He continued, referencing a point that protesters made about the need to include their generational knowledge, which has protected the land for hundreds of years. “COPs makes no sense…if you are talking about environmental protections, why indigenous peoples are left outside, and big institutions are sitting at the table negotiating our lives.”
Helena Gualinga, a COP30 participant who comes from an indigenous community elaborated that indigenous leaders were not let into decision-making forums, or that they had to maneuver their way in. She spoke to the fear that the way indigenous individuals were included and counted led to an “indigenous-washing” of the summit, where they didn’t have real power and their contributions were tokenized.
The changes made by COP30 officials are important—they represent an acknowledgement that the old way isn’t working. At the same time, the protests by locals are vital, because they pressure the point further. They represent that the old mindset isn’t working, and whatever is built within its confines will fail.
Reangling our political perspective
What discussions around COP30 and the Democratic Party represent, to me, is a big shift in civic values and a slow recognition of its meaning.
We have operated, for a very long time, with the idea that our political systems can and should operate with big industrial players and their preferred mode of capitalism as primary considerations. Though this methodology never worked particularly well, it was accepted well enough to fuel decades of winning elections and dominant political discourse.
Measures centered on trickle-down economics and gross domestic product defined a country’s success, and most people didn’t argue that fact, they just argued how it might be better obtained.
Now, a broader narrative is taking hold. Conversations that focus on affordability, wealth distribution, and social responsibility are a common part of public discourse. Winning arguments call out the absurdity of prioritizing the few over the many, in part because there is now so much scientific and blatantly observable evidence that it doesn’t work for the wellbeing of an entire population.
You see evidence of this flood of a new collective understanding in protest signs, voter polls, and discussions with people you cross paths with everyday.
Still, it’s hard for politicians and their supporters to jump into this unknown realm. As a nation, we embody the push and pull between needing something brand new and wanting certainty that is impossible to have with it. Wanting a price tag. Wanting a success rate. Wanting a timeline.
How can we adopt a platform full of uncertainty, untested in debates, and founded in faith in finding something better as we go? We are on the precipice of adopting new ways of governing and caring for one another, and although the idea sounds great, it’s a big leap of faith to think it could actually be successful.
So, instead, we kind of straddle the gap between the two. One side is stuck in the certainty of fighting for change within the old system, and the other is reaching for something completely new. Luckily, right now, it seems like momentum is favoring a step that would land on the side of a more progressive government and civil society.
This brings us back to that reporter’s burning question for Bernie. What about right now?
While we are now in the middle of what seems like a momentous political movement, there’s a lot of hurriedness in the political dialogue. We scan our current political roster and decide who will be the next person to pit against Trump. We debate which of today’s political points will be the determinant in next year’s elections.
But look at all that is happening. Look at the knowledge everyone has gained by seeing uninhibited capitalism, corruption and loopholes hard at work, and see the unrelenting response against it. Look at the reshaping of our civic world.
It’s just not finalized yet.
Time is of the essence but so is reading the times. Today is a new day. Our answers are still coming. We don’t know, but we are getting stronger. We are finding a way to have new conversations, and we are fostering leaders that speak with that strength from that perspective.
Maybe we find those leaders in our communities, in our local movements. Maybe they’re just now finding themselves in these unbound spaces, full of possibility, and setting rules that the old guard can’t understand. Maybe each of us is defining what is needed and what is possible in our government each time we take part in our civil discourse. Online, in person, every moment of every day.
Right now, it is what it is, but change is in motion.
And we need to harness all of our courage to believe it, invest in it, and leap towards it with all we’ve got, trusting we’ll find our way in the unknown.
With love and hope for the future,
Stephanie
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When you think of political change, how do you envision it happening?
What makes you impatient? What helps you embrace a longer, more gradual evolution?
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Among a multitude of reasons for not being interested, Bernie Sanders is not a Democrat. While most Democrats including Hillary Clinton&Kamala Harris agree with Bernie’s stated goals, they’ve never tried to divide a party they don’t belong, or suggested abstaining from voting as a useful method of expression.