Suffragettes, Sanders, and When to Vote ... like, NOW.

Suffragettes, Sanders, and When to Vote
by Mary Petiet * Friday, July 17, 2015 * by Common Dreams

My Aunt Louisa was a suffragette. As a girl she ran away from home and a well-planned future. She secretly took the train from Annapolis to Boston, and enrolled herself at Radcliff College before they noticed her missing. She became a mathematician, a teacher, a Quaker, and a suffragette. At no small risk to herself, she rallied and marched and held signs, and she was there when the right to vote was finally granted.

That right was hard won, and until recently I had never imagined abstaining. The power of electoral input was granted American women, only after years of struggle, in 1919. We have been able to vote for almost one hundred years. That is a mere blip in time in the course of political power, yet within that time we have produced female politicians and even female contenders for the White House. We’ve come a long way, baby.

“How can you even think of not voting?” my mother would demand in my younger, more apolitical days. I would shrug with adolescent non-nonchalance, but in the end I would always turn up at the polls. Other women had suffered to win us this right, and I could not let them down, or myself. This was important.

I did not always vote wisely at first, but my choices improved as I became more informed, until finally my choices began to reflect the world view that I had created. My world view is inclusive and implies a certain degree of freedom, integrity and social responsibility. (snip)

Benito Mussolini is said to have described fascism as “corporatism, since it is the merger of state and corporate power." That sounds an awful lot like what we are facing here, now, and today. But recently a solution turned up. On April 20, the senator from Vermont, Bernie Sanders, announced his candidacy for the democratic primaries. Even though he knows he is the underdog, he is getting his message out, and his biggest point is that he is unowned. Nobody owns Bernie Sanders. He has made this very clear. His idea of a super pac is 200 million people with $1 each. He told the corporations that he does not want their support, and advised the 1% to not vote for him because it would be against their own self-interest. The audacity, the bravery, the honesty!

MORE:http://www.commondreams.org/views/2015/07/17/suffragettes-sanders-and-when-vote