Even though the 2016 Presidential elections are over a year away, candidates are already publicly debating while voters are already choosing their favorites. Most candidates on next year’s ballot have been heard of before – due to either previous positions in the White House, their insensitive, racist, and/or sexist comments, or other various scandals.
One candidate, however, has stood out from the rest in a way that is capturing the attention of many young voters. Bernie Sanders, a little-known junior Senator from Vermont and the longest-serving Independent in United States history, is a candidate for the Democratic Party’s nomination for President.
He’s a self-declared Independent Socialist – a word many Americans are afraid of uttering. He wants to eliminate the ever-increasing costs of higher education, close the wage gap by raising the minimum wage and increasing the tax on the rich, seek an end to institutional racism, tackle the inclining threat of climate change, and reform the largest financial institutions in the country – Wall Street, the Federal Reserve, etc.
Along with those issues, Sanders believes in a woman’s right to choose, fully supports the Supreme Court’s decision to legalize same-sex marriage, and wants to provide healthcare for ALL Americans.
Basically, Bernie Sanders is the key to getting this country back on track.
Not a single candidate has spoken about Sandra Bland, Michael Brown, Rekia Boyd, Eric Garner, Walter Scott, Freddie Gray, Tamir Rice, Samuel Dubose, and the hundreds of other people of color who were a victim of systematic racism in this country – except Sanders. He sees racism in four ways:
- Physical violence, which is perpetrated by the state (unarmed people of color being gunned down by police) and by extremists (the Charleston shooting, where a Confederate flag worshipping white man killed nine in a church).
- Political violence, which is expressed through requiring photo ID in order to vote, drawing discriminatory Congressional districts, not allowing early registration or voting, etc. A recent study has shown that African-Americans have to wait twice as long as Whites to be able to vote.
- Legal violence, in which people are unfairly jailed for nonviolent crimes. Black people are imprisoned six times more than whites. Sanders wants to ban privatized prisons, which profit off of the amount of people they can keep behind bars. America has the largest incarceration rate in the world, and that is one of the many issues about this country that needs to be addressed.
- Economic violence is another factor of institutional racism. An example is how African-American children are more likely to face harsh punishments at school, tainting their communities’ graduation rates and harming their chances to get a higher education. This also connects back to providing free public college in order to give everyone – no matter race or family income – a fair shot at a degree and a higher paying job.
At a time where our country seems to moving more backwards than forward in terms of social and economic progress, Bernie Sanders is the one presidential candidate that has the potential to help this nation in a time when we need it the most.
Whether you support him or not, I suggest you look into the candidates and decide who you side with the most. Our age group is the largest in America, yet we vote the least. That must change if we want to see any kind of progress in our country.
If you’re unsure where to start, try this quiz: https://www.isidewith.com/
