It's so easy to mock him or his congregants, to say they deserve it, or that we're watching natural selection at work. People are saying all those things. But we don't believe in thinning the herd. We believe in inclusion, in uplift, in solidarity.
Don't we?
Bored to Death
You know who understands what's needed to fix this situation? The person who recently wrote these words:
"It is at this moment that we must remember that we are all in this together ... Now is the time for solidarity, and robust action."
Oh, but wait. I'm told by this "woke" writer that this person doesn't matter.
"I can finally go back to being bored by electoral politics," the writer says, "because no matter who the next president is, it will be an elderly white man."
That reductive summary erases Bernie Sanders's Jewishness, a minority status that in his lifetime meant widespread prejudice and the loss of his relatives in the Holocaust. His story has been reduced to two dimensions or less with this dismissive wave of implied anti-Semitism.
Boredom is a curious response to the fates of millions, moreover, and even the future of your own cause. The writer even acknowledges that Sanders has better policies for feminists, but adds: "The joy of being Team No One is that I genuinely don't care."
Not caring is the real disease of the hour.
Instant Replay
Bernie Sanders waves his hands too much, someone on TV said. Someone else said he makes their "skin crawl." Every time I hear those words, I know they could be talking about my Jewish immigrant grandfather 60 years ago, or someone else's Muslim immigrant grandfather today.
My Jewish grandparents saw the destruction of their village, their culture, their entire way of life. My grandfather was an atheist a "freethinker," as they were called back then but his father was a Rabbinical high court judge. I read that back in their home country, during my great-grandfather's lifetime, he and the other judges issued a warning that the end of the world was imminent. Gog and Magog were afoot in Europe.
For them, at least, it was true. After he helped his village escape from the Cossacks, my grandfather worked as a tailor on the Upper West Side for the rest of his life. He died in 1965 after a brief retirement.
I remember the smell of the steam press in his tailor shop, even after all these years.
My other grandfather, the Colonel, was a tall, straight-spined man of what was once known as "military bearing." English-settler and Christian by background, he did not wave his hands and would not have made an MSNBC commentator's skin crawl.
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