Iron Mills then, No Living Wage today: Feel the Bern & VOTE, VOTE, VOTE

(D)ude: Man! There’s a quote by Bernie Sanders concerning changing his campaign messaging only when the issues he brings up in his speeches not only get raised but resolved. What’s that quote again, because Barbara Boxer thinks Bernie’s repetitious without purpose! 

(M)an: Dude! Bernie Sanders is never without purpose! You’re onto something that needs to be addressed finally and that point is that the rest of the 98% of us need to be reassured and reminded of the fundamental rights for which we are fighting for in this presidential election cycle. Bernie addresses his repetitiousness very elegantly as such,

My political opponents in Vermont often accuse me of being boring, of hammering away at the same themes. They’re probably right. It has never made sense to me, then or now, that a tiny clique of people should have incredible wealth and power while most people have none. Justice is not a complicated concept, nor a “new” idea. Tragically, most politicians do not talk about the most serious issues facing our country, or the real causes of our problems. So I do. Over and over again. This drives the media and my opponents a bit crazy, but most Vermonters seem to appreciate that I address the issues most relevant to their lives. And should we ever achieve economic and social justice in this country, I promise that I’ll write some new speeches.

D: Man! Hillary Rodham Clinton and her husband have been accused of politicizing the Flint, Michigan poisoned water crisis. Bernie Sanders winning the democratic primary in Michigan only proves that the American voter cannot be placed in an intellectual vacuum or subjected by the cookie cutter mentality of the 2% that relies upon poverty and disenfranchisement, both having no place in the twenty-first century since we know they are manufactured hells, to cripple laborers physically without living wages and time for reflection. In fact, the 2% are so paranoid about giving the laboring classes time for reflection because they suspect reflection will be grounds for rebellion by the overworked and underpaid like us. The fact of the matter has been discussed in great detail by Rebecca Harding Davis [1831-1910] in her short story Life in the Iron Mills. There’s a passage in this fictional work that transcends nonfiction and embodies the soul of the indentured and enslaved through the overworked and underpaid iron mill worker Hugh Wolfe:

If you could go into this mill where Deborah lay, and drag out from the hearts of these men the terrible tragedy of their lives, taking it as a symptom of the disease of their class, no ghost Horror would terrify you more. A reality of soul-starvation, of living death, that meets you every day under the besotted faces on the street,-I can paint nothing of this, only give you the outside outlines of a night, a crisis in the life of one man: whatever muddy depth of soul-history lies beneath you can read according to the eyes God has given you.

Wolfe, while Deborah watched him as a spaniel its master, bent over the furnace with his iron pole, unconscious of her scrutiny. Physically, Nature had promised the man but little. He had already lost the strength and instinct vigor of a man, his muscles were thin, his nerves weak, his face (a meek woman’s face) haggard, yellow with consumption. In the mill he was known as one of the girl-men: “Molly Wolfe” was his sobriquet. He was never seen in the cockpit, did not own a terrier, drank but seldom; when he did, desperately. He fought sometimes, but was always thrashed, pommelled to a jelly. The man was game enough, when his blood was up: but he was no favorite in the mill; he had the taint of school-learning on him,-not to a dangerous extent, only a quarter or so in the free-school in fact, but enough to ruin him as a good hand in a fight.

For other reasons, too, he was not popular. Not one of themselves, they felt that, though outwardly as filthy and ash-covered; silent, with foreign thoughts and longings breaking out through his quietness in innumerable curious ways: this one, for instance. In the neighboring furnace-buildings lay great heaps of the refuse from the ore after the pig-metal is run.

Korl we call it here: a light, porous substance, of a delicate, waxen, flesh-colored tinge. Out of the blocks of this korl, Wolfe in his off-hours from the furnace, had a habit of chipping and mounding figures,-hideous, fantastic enough, but sometimes strangely beautiful: even the mill-men saw that, while they jeered at him.

It was a curious fancy in the man, almost a passion. The few hours for rest he spent hewing and hacking with his blunt knife, never speaking, until his watch came again,-working at one figure for months, and, when it was finished, breaking it to pieces perhaps, in a fit of disappointment. A morbid, gloomy man, untaught, unled, left to feed his soul in grossness and crime, and hard, grinding labor.

M: Dude! The issues brought up in the Flint, Michigan water poisoning crisis have everything to do with the Clintons and the state and federal legislatures following through with their commitments to the afflicted residents and their children until the crisis is completely resolved.

D: Man! The Flint, Michigan devastation is a frightening consequence of people voting against their best interests when they vote for the Republican ticket in elections. There is a cycle of corruption at the Republican Tea and Teabag Democrat level of American Government right now and that is the wheel of misfortune running over disenfranchised and poor populations because of the obstructionist United States Congressmen and Congresswomen wanting to usher in another Republican candidate into the White House through cheating tactics like preempting debates and contested conventions. One of the Democratic Super-PACs has withdrawn itself from financing any further events, in declaration that Hillary Rodham Clinton is the winner although we’re only at the half way mark! The West is yet to be won! Talk about corporate corruption!

M: Dude! The Democratic Party will have to dislocate its corporate joints by declaring the first-place finisher the presidential nominee and the second-place finisher the vice presidential nominee. Otherwise, the Republican Party’s wasting time and money to avoid getting to the crux of the issues facing US today, will have prevailed. And we need Bernie Sanders to continue fighting for US or, otherwise, the American corporate interests will have trumped democracy on the backs of US laborers. Hillary Rodham Clinton will lose to Donald Trump if Bernie Sanders continues receiving such a corrupt reception by the American Media. Bernie’s remarkable ten-month journey deserves respect and acknowledgment from the Clintons and their Teabag Democrat posses across the United States map.

D: Man! People can easily dislodge corporate interests through the power of our vote. We must feel the Bern all the way to the conventions in the summer! Either that, or democracy in America will have died.