2016 Postmortem
In reply to the discussion: The Ironic Hijacking of the Bernie Sanders’ Campaign by Elitist White Progressives [View all]cascadiance
(19,537 posts)You say you like him, but you aren't telling us why you like her far more and feel very strongly obviously that she should be president and not him.
We are coming out and explaining by talking about the issues why we like him and why we feel he needs to be president and back it up with how we feel he will do the right things and are specific about them.
It's hard to get anything from a Hillary supporter why she's so much better than him, other than "she can do better in the GE than he can against the Republicans" with no real solid means to establish that as a fact.
And we ARE NOT criticizing a civil rights movement. Just about all of us have supported what the BLM was set up to help fight for (police violence against minority populations, etc.), but we criticize behaviors of certain INDIVIDUALS who claim to be a part of that movement, but who put blanket criticisms on all of us through things like calling all of us "white supremacists" with absolutely NO basis, and using that as a rationale for shutting down Bernie's ability to speak to a crowd of people on a topic that they all want to collectively hear about, and even offering them time to talk on their issue, even if it wasn't the topic that the crowd was there to hear about (social security, etc. in Seattle, or immigration at Netroots).
I'm all for many engaged in civil disobedience, when it targets those groups of people that facilitate the problems that they are fighting against (as Code Pink does in most cases of its actions, or other groups like that). And I don't even mind someone from BLM and would even support coming up and taking the stage to help build out more attention for this cause, as long as they are focused on that, and not making personal attacks on others that really don't deserve it because they and who they are supporting, have already shown that they've tried to support their cause.
The key to civil disobedience is to raise awareness of issues both with those that oppose that issue and those who support it, but not to go out of your way to alienate those that might help you support it. If that alienation, and many's reaction to it is translated in to a mass criticism of us being some kind of less than human as followers of Bernie, then that is just not going to work over time. It will only build support for the movement instead of people wanting to work on the ISSUE they support as well as the other issues that we and Bernie also want to support, which was evidenced with the immediate growth in size of crowds a day later after that Seattle protest, and the corresponding strong messages given to and embraced by those crowds about the issues that BLM supports.
You might not like it that his followers don't prefer Hillary over him as president, and that we also cheer him on for many positions and his work on them that you have a hard time criticizing too, but that's just the way it is with a movement like he's helping to lead now.