Letter: Sanders is running against civic resignation

Editor,

Civic resignation is the head bowed to the inexorable outcome; the shrug that follows two centuries of democracy at half mast; the unquieted, Flint-Michigan-state-of-dread that knows that someone will put something in the tap.

Civic resignation is the cardinal criticism of Sanders: unwinnable odds, unmovable stone, unwalkable walk. The establishment will man the trenches for its candidate and it will be a churlish slog to the dour party coronation, where the enthusiasm of Progressives, Liberals and Democrats will be as uplifted as a funerary epitaph and as upbeat as a bread-line. Civic resignation is the symptom of exclusion, the inurement to the Rosa Parks treatment, the disinclination to invest in the institutions of self-governance, because it has been conditioned by a political process where even the moral compass takes-a-knee to Wall Street. So, this is not an indictment, it’s an evangel.

Civic resignation walks a long green mile, and it understandably needs a miracle after two American centuries of economic exclusion. And if your passion is the correction of exclusion of every other stripe, know that they can’t be unscrewed without unscrewing the economic error first, which has been the foundation for every under-the-rug act of racism and disguised disenfranchisement since the Civil Rights Act.

Civic resignation needs a proof as apparent as a parting of the waters and here it is: a campaign as peaceful as a sit-in, seven caravanning victories against the all-but-nominee, five by a margin of 70 percent or more, and all while out-fundraising through individual donations, a second-generation establishment-candidate with the foregone affiliation of Wall Street. More than that: a record-breaking voter turn-out to break the record broken by the black, impossible, Junior Senator from Illinois and a plan to break up banks now bigger in this election year than when they first required bailing out.

And whatever may be our (rightful) reservations of the papacy, the Pope does canvass for the poor, and Sanders is the only candidate to be extended an invitation from the Vatican to talk moral economics.

The impossible, possibilized: this is bread-and-loaves civic process, this is Lazarus-rousing electioneering, this is the Civil Rights era awoken and unslumbered. And it is the reason that Sanders enthusiasm has become so unembarrasedly adventist and so roof-top whoopingly enamored. The journalist on the obituarist’s beat insists that Sanders should have hit the establishment-candidate harder; he should have raked-muck, scraped-bone, or bemudded his opposition, and that the man did not is a journeyman’s missed opportunity, because Sanders is never winning without an asterisk.

And yet, the expectation unfulfilled to the reporter is, to the people, his appeal. This isn’t politics, this is process; your skepticism breaks on our results; Sanders isn’t a candidate, he is a movement; Sanders isn’t winning, we are.

New Mexico’s closed primary (June 7th) requires that Sanders supporters be registered Democrats. Voter registration can be done online at the county clerk’s website at: www.bernco.gov/clerk/

Jason Merriam

UNM student