by Elizabeth Vos, Disobedient Media:

The death of hope can push us into a very dark place, but that darkness is the birth canal of real change.

The Dream 

For some people, hope came in the form of a red hat, with stenciled letters embracing their foreheads promising to Make America Great Again. My hopes were pinned instead on Bernie Sanders: my idealistic, naive trust was uniquely attached to the blue and white of the Bernie sticker I placed on the bumper of my car. Words can’t adequately describe the innocent hope I attached to those colors. As Jared Beck writes in his book, What Happened To Bernie Sanders:

“In 2016, the dream was shared by over twelve million Democratic primary voters, as well as nearly 2.5 million campaign donors, that for the first time in forty-four years, a genuinely progressive candidate might run for President of the United States as a major party candidate… In seeking the explanation for how the dreams of millions of Americans came to be shattered in this manner, I have found it necessary to come to terms with the potential demise of my own dreamscape – one that has propelled my life path since my middle school days in a small suburban community outside Albany, New York.”

Jared Beck and his wife Elizabeth Lee Beck are attorneys for the plaintiffs in the DNC Fraud lawsuit. What Happened To Bernie Sanders diagrams the reasoning behind Beck’s disillusionment with the efficacy of both the legal system and the Democratic Party. Ultimately, Beck concludes that the DNC is beyond saving and has successfully engineered the nomination process to such an extent that, in his opinion, there is no way in which an anti-establishment progressive could hope to be nominated as a Democratic Party Presidential candidate. He concludes that the only way for progressive ideals to germinate lies outside the DNC.

Like many others, I believed that Bernie Sanders intended to create a grassroots movement that served all of us, in contrast with Hillary Clinton’s overtly self-centered “I’m with her” campaign slogan. I thought Sanders would spearhead a challenge to the corrupt political establishment. This was the Sanders that inspired me. When he spoke about a movement that was made up of the people, not centered on the person who led it, I believed him.

In September 2015, my week was made infinitely better when a fellow Bernie supporter left the above note anonymously on my windshield. For me, this was an example of a fellowship among those who supported Sanders: one based on positivity, inclusiveness and genuine hope.

Such goodwill was epitomized by the famous incident in spring 2016 when a small bird landed on Sanders’s podium as he spoke to a packed rally in Oregon. The event inspired viral memes and articles almost instantaneously. Like so many others, my emotions and hopes were tied up in what I felt Sanders’s campaign represented: a movement driven by all of us, and that together we could make changes that were beautiful and real. The finch-on-the-podium embodied that emotion.

The near-biblical overtone of the finch landing on Sanders’ podium did not go unnoticed. Local press at the time reported Sanders’s remarks: “I think there’s some symbolism here, I know it may not look like it, but that bird is really a dove asking us for world peace.” There is nothing like a little divine intervention to inspire the emotions of a crowd, and that is exactly what the bird-on-the-podium moment did.

The Death Of The Dream

Faith keeps many of us in situations we might otherwise walk away from, whether in our personal lives, our professional spheres or on a national level. As a small-scale example, hope and a treasured ideal in relationship allows a person to ignore the cheating or violence of their partner, in hopes that next time they really mean it when they say they love you, and that they are telling the truth when they claim that whatever variety of betrayal won’t happen again. The death of that dream – the realization that the relationship will never change and that there is no hope for a different future with that person – is what finally frees one to leave the situation.

As Caitlin Johnstone puts it:

Forgiveness is a key foundational element in most abusive relationships. The abusee is manipulated or bullied into forgiving the abuser again and again, without ever holding a grudge. This is true of a battered spouse, and it is true of an oppressed populace.

— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) 27 August 2018

In a larger sense, the only way we can begin to tangibly change an unacceptable national reality is to begin by facing it head on: hope allows us to continue to live in unacceptable conditions. To run from the death of dreams, then, is to run from the death of an illusion that prevents change.

As a Sanders supporter, the dream didn’t die when he was cheated out of the Democratic nomination in the spring of 2016. It finally burned out only when Sanders refused to confront the rigging of the election by the DNC, and again when he endorsed the neo-Mccarthyist agenda engineered to deflect from the election rigging that stole the nomination from him. This represented a betrayal of the millions of people who spent their food and rent money to raise more than $200 million in support of his campaign.

Sanders didn’t stop at quietly allowing lies to circulate, he actively participated in perpetuating and endorsing them. Even as Clintonite trolls and hack jobs continued to blame him and his supporters for Clinton’s loss, spewing hatred at the same people they rigged an election to cheat, Sanders did not stand up for those who voted for him. Instead, he validated the lies used to silence them.

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