Dear Senator Sanders:
Your "revolution", so-called by you, has ended with a whimper. Your betrayal -- exactly that in the minds of many -- is profound, because your turnaround was extreme. Clinton has long represented absolutely everything that you -- presumably -- were trying to counter. Hillary Clinton, like her close associate Lloyd Blankfein, is a perfect embodiment of vast wealth disparity and its causes, and in endorsing her you have taken her baggage onto yourself, much to the chagrin of so many of your backers. That you were able to get some concessions for the Democratic Platform, all non-binding and certain to be ignored, in no way threatens an evil status quo and its course.
Early on, Hillary Clinton laughed as she predicted that you would ultimately come to heel. She was so confident. She knew you best. One has to wonder if you planned all along to "unify" in the end. If so, it didn't show, at least not to me; I really did believe you were the real deal. I have to hand it to you: you're a better actor than either Reagan or Obama. But while your show of revolutionary fervor may have been convincing in the past, your crusading now, with Hillary at your side in all of that syrupy show of "unity", her head bobbing in agreement as you hold forth on "continuing the revolution", rings very hollow.
You have managed to trivialize the concept of "revolution" as your own quickly shrank into a narrow focus of "stop TPP/stop Trump". TPP is one of a litany of 'free trade' agreements, and even if it's not TPP right now, there will be plenty of others waiting in the wings, each to serve as a crisis du jour. The issue of TPP as replacement for a "revolution" simply doesn't wash. Nor does "Stop Trump", which is simply another "lesser vs greater of two evils" situation (Really, is Hillary a lesser evil than Trump?) of the sort with which the country has had deal every four years in recent decades.
The Democratic National Committee and the Clinton Campaign are basically synonymous, and from the very beginning they/it undermined your campaign without letup by every means available, fair or foul. You owe the democrats nothing at all. The Green Party philosophy has always been in harmony with everything you wanted people to believe you stand for, and had you accepted that Party's invitation -- their arms were wide open -- it would have fueled a REVOLUTION worthy of such a designation, because it would have signaled the beginning of the end of the nightmare of the two-party system, a rotten "coke or pepsi" duopoly central to our corrupt system, a duopoly that has been easily bought off.
The country is so fed up with the orchestrated con game that is our government, and sufficiently disgusted with "front runners" Trump and Clinton, that there is every reason to suppose that you, running on the Green Party ticket, could have won a plurality in a three-way election. There was plenty of time for you and Jill Stein, in debates leading to the general election, to speak all the shocking truths so long buried, and to blow the walls out of our restrictive political culture, opening the path for a surge of the disaffected out of both major parties and providing a worthy, long-sought environment for a multitude of independents. That is what many had hoped for. But, alas, 'tis not to be. Your claim of "momentum" throughout your campaign was correct, but when you broke faith by joining with Clinton, what you called a revolution, and all the promise it held, abruptly ended.
Bill Willers
Wisconsin
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