[Bernies staff here says we knocked on 130,000 doors this weekend.
I did about 250 of those doors, so do the math: 500 people like me.
Possibly I’m just swept up in the moment, but it seems like a great
social movement in the making.] [[link removed]]

THE SANDERS REVOLUTION IN DES MOINES, IOWA  
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Marc Kagan
February 29, 2020

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_ Bernie's staff here says we knocked on 130,000 doors this weekend.
I did about 250 of those doors, so do the math: 500 people like me.
Possibly I’m just swept up in the moment, but it seems like a great
social movement in the making. _

, Photo from Bernie 2020

 

VOLUNTEERS FOR BERNIE. Three days of door-to-door canvassing, a day
of phone-banking to encourage supporters to become volunteers, and a
day of delivering lawn signs. It’s the meat and potatoes (or
veggie-burger and fries) of a political campaign based on the 99%. I
was surrounded by people – mostly under-30 youth, mixed gender,
multi-racial, in town from Spokane to San Antonio to West Virginia to
the Bronx – expecting, happy, to be doing this necessary grunt work:
for Bernie, for the Green New Deal, for Medicare-for-All.
 
One afternoon, the lead Des Moines organizer gathered two dozen of the
volunteers. We went around the room: why are you here? “We could
change this country for the next one hundred years,” said one
person, during a remarkable hour in which people talked about their
hopes and dreams and the reasons they came to Iowa.
 
I almost lost hope, but I decided to turn that anger into motivation.
I no longer feel powerless about these things that seems out of your
control: I felt like I was doing something about it. Each time I talk
to somebody and tell them, “there is someone fighting for you, there
are these solutions that are possible, the world doesn’t have to be
like this,” I feel like I’m saving someone from despair. That’s
my Bernie story.
 
I really respect how Bernie isn’t trying to be anyone’s savior or
lead from ahead. He’s just trying to take the energy and voices and
amplify them. I came out to Iowa because I had to; I want to give it
everything I can.
 
I’ve been involved in anti-capitalist politics since I was a
teenager. In 2016, I saw a glimmer of hope for the organized left in
America and I felt obligated to be a part of that.
 
I was a vegan and I saw how the agricultural industry was affecting
the FDA about everything America grows and eats…. As soon as I saw
Bernie talk about why the government isn’t working for us I just got
the chills and started crying. To hear somebody finally talking about
the root of the cause of our problems. I didn’t volunteer last time
around, but this time I just had to, so here I am.
 
We grew up poor, with a single mother struggling, so I always
understood that there was something wrong with the world, that it
wasn’t just my mother’s failing as a human being. This has been
the thing that’s saving me. 
 
I’m still learning about leftist politics… I wasn’t planning on
coming out but my organizing friend told me, “you need to come out
here right now.” For me, personally, it feels like the first time
that I’ve been off the sidelines and putting my money where my mouth
is in terms of my beliefs.
 
My daughter was born 2 months premature and she was in the hospital
for two months and the medical bills just piled up and twelve years
later, I’m still in debt. Because of that, I can’t buy a house. We
live in public housing and my daughter has to go to a bad school. Her
whole life is being pre-determined because at the wrong moment I
didn’t have health insurance. 
 
I feel like there really is a movement going on in our country
that’s going to define our generation if he wins and could change
the country for the next hundred years.
 
Coming from South Texas, I’d always been disengaged. When Bernie got
in the race in 2016, I felt like someone was speaking on behalf of my
community. It’s such a big country, but thinking about the working
class people’s situation in Texas and Des Moines and New York,
it’s made the country in my mind a lot smaller and we really have so
much more in common and where we’re trying to get to.
 
My mom and aunt work through people who have fallen through the cracks
of the health care system and just hearing their stories, how their
cases fell pretty hopeless.
 
Huntington West Virginia is just the intersection of the Rust Belt,
the Bible Belt and Appalachia. My mom is a teacher in a poor school
district and the stories that she tells me are just heartbreaking:
five year olds who don’t eat at all except at school.
 
Medicare-for-all is big for me. My sister has Crohn’s Disease.
She’s in the middle of a career change, becoming a teacher, and as a
student teacher she doesn’t get health care. She needs infusions
every few weeks – she can’t afford it and I think she is just
going to go off of it.
 
There’s just so much injustice; the system is so messed up in so
many ways, seeing someone like Bernie Sanders who has not let special
interests sway him in the least for forty years. I think I haven’t
had any hope my whole life watching any candidates. When I saw Bernie
make a run for it in 2016, it just gave me so much hope. I regretted
not doing more. This time, I wasn’t going to just sit on the
sidelines and let it happen. I’m in it for the long haul, I think.
 
Bernie might lose an election, AOC might lose an election, but the
people who really lose are the people, the people who end up with
politicians who don’t represent them, people who end up sacrificing
their sons and daughters in needless regime change conflicts. Iowa
just feels so fucking important. I’m here to carpet-bomb for as long
as I can afford to be out here.
 
GROUND GAME. At least in the sort-of prosperous working class
neighborhoods I mostly worked, no one else seems to have any
comparable ground game – maybe Buttegig, a bit. I didn’t see a
Biden lawn sign once during my five days. (But I saw plenty of people
without teeth – no Medicaid expansion here, and no Medicaid Dental.
And the minimum wage is still $7.25. Ugh. I think about what a
life-changing experience $15/hr has been for my students in New York.)
The staff here says we knocked on 130,000 doors this weekend. Working
8 hours a day, I did about 250 of those doors, so do the math: 500
people like me. Possibly I’m just swept up in the moment, but from
here it seems like a great social movement in the making.
 

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