Frank Jackman’s Bernie Sanders Stump Speech To All Who Will Listen Whatever Front He Finds Himself On In The Coming Months-Bernie Vision 2020 Boston from the heart and here today to testify, to give my reasons for supporting the Senator:

Yes, of course I support Senator Sanders’ “Medicare for All” and healthcare reform proposals putting our country in line with the real world. Of course, I am for the elimination of student debt based on past experiences, having put a couple of kids through college-and graduate schools. And of course, I support the Green New Deal for the future of the planet, for ourselves as well as those same kids and for our collective grandchildren.

Today though I want to get down to my primary reason for supporting the Senator.

Earlier this year, back in January, a number of us from the Boston area, veterans, including fellow VFP members, labor organizers, old time civil rights activists and other political activists seeing what we have seen for the past few years decided we had to dig in early to beat Trump. The overwhelming consensus was that Senator Sanders was the only person who could go down in the mud of what will be the 2020 sewer-etched campaign with Trump and survive. Our last best hope to avoid the catastrophe of four years of Trump unchained.

My own reason for supporting the Senator is because I am fearful for the fate of our Republic, our beautiful if flawed republican experiment which from day one has always been just a step away from being something very different once the bagmen, the grifters, the corner cutters dig in. I cannot believe, wizened as I am, that at age 73 I have to once again go out on the streets as a winter soldier, someone to defend the republican values we have painfully etched out of couple of millennia of human scratching. So be it. I had thought I had a negotiated at least in my head an “unarmed truce” with the government. I was mistaken-they still want my, your butt on a platter. 

The last time I found myself in this desperate situation was in the spring of 1968 when I went all over the East as a youth organizer for Bobbie, beautiful “seek a newer world,” ruthless in that Irish clan sense Bobbie Kennedy before he was gunned down. The villain then one common criminal, con man, unholy goof and thief Richard Milhous Nixon.

Bobbie, who had the scars to prove it, once said that Nixon represented what was the dark side of the American spirit. Trump is Nixon on steroids, and then some.

My support for Senator Sanders is deeper than whoever his Republican opponent might be and goes to the questions of trust and courage. There is a famous, although not famous enough, photograph from 1963 available via Wikipedia  showing a young college student from the University of Chicago being dragooned by the even then notorious Chicago police. Reason: participation in a demonstration to integrate the still deeply segregated Chicago housing facilities. Name: Bernard Sanders. When I saw that photograph I said to somebody who asked my opinion that if anybody asked me what kind of President I wanted just look at the photo.

Here is the invisible, the unshakable bond of solidarity, the spiritual link if you will between the Senator and me -in 1969 yes, 50 years ago if you can believe that, I had been drafted into the Army and ordered to Vietnam. I won’t give the details of my experience since this is about the Senator not me, but I served a couple of six-month terms at the Fort Devens stockade for refusing those orders, for saying no. And here in 2019 the Senator and I are still fighting that youthful fight for social justice and against war, the same good fight, still believing that, as Lincoln said, the better angels of our natures will prevail. 

This is, given my medical diagnosis, probably the last great political campaign of my life, the last time I will have the energy, the stamina and will to go down in the mud to preserve whatever culture we have accumulated currently being debased. I am very happy that I made that January decision.  I am proud to stand shoulder to shoulder in the movement being led by us, by Senator Sanders.