Of all the memes that push all my buttons, is one with Hillary Clinton and Sanders with the question what were you doing in the 60s. . The two are pictured in the sixties with Clinton reduced to her political identity from high school and her first year in college and Sanders framed as a front line warrior for civil rights. No context of time, no more information. Just the demonization Clinton in the eyes of “progressives” of all hues. This picture shuts down discussion, logic and in fact the real truth.

Just by looking at the picture, one immediately thinks, he was in the front lines fighting and she was coddled in the haven of Republican America working against social justice, civil rights and all that defines the left.

But, if you dig a bit, well not much, just go to Wikipedia page for each one you will see the timeline.

Let’s start when they were born: Sanders was born 1941, Hillary was born 1947. So, 1965 Sanders was 24, Clinton was 18. Sanders graduated from the University of Chicago 1964, Clinton graduated from Wellsesley 1969.

Ok, now we have context. The picture implies that Bernie was in the front lines leading the “struggle”. Hillary in 1964 was 17, Bernie was 23.

Sanders went to college from New York, City from a family that was politically from the left. Clinton, came from Chicago from a family where the mother was a Democrat and the father was Republican. She did work for the Galdwater campaign in 1964, when she was 17. Sanders was in college and that is when he marched and organized against segregation.

In college Clinton went on to work for Eugene McCarthy’s campaign, organized a college strike the day MLK was assassinated and with the few black students at Wellsley got the college to create a program for hiring more black professors and recruiting more black students.

Clinton wrote her senior thesis on Saul Alinsky, the founder of community organizing. Alinsky offered her a job, but she chose to go to Law School at Yale. When she graduated she worked on a fishing boat in Alaska. She complained about the safety on the boat and the company fired her — late it closed down later because of the violations.

Her next GOP connection was when Clinton interned in Congress for Republican Representative Laird from Wisconsin:

“My adviser said, ‘I’m still going to assign you to the Republicans because I want you to understand completely what your own transformation represents,” Mrs. Clinton recalled of Mr. Schechter.

This is what the GOP staffer at the time said about Clinton, now he heads the Heritage Foundation :

“I remember her being very bright, very aggressive and not very Republican,” said Ed Feulner, who managed the summer interns in the office and now heads the Heritage Foundation, a conservative research group.

Certified by the head of the Heritage Foundation not a Republican by 1969. Yet, the image of her being a Republican is spread and in fact engrained in some Sanders supporters.

Clinton completed Yale Law in 1973. She did post graduate work with the Children’s Defense Fund, worked for the McGovern campaign, staffed the Watergate hearings, Started Arkansas Advocates for Chidren, served on the Board of the Legal Services Corporation married and became first lady of Arkansas at 31.

Sanders graduated 1964, moved to Vermont married and did various jobs. Organized with the Liberty Union party, wrote articles . He married and then divorced. He applied as a conscientious objector, he was declined but by that time he was too old to serve. In 1971, at 30, he joined Liberty Union Party and ran for several offices under the party before becoming an Independent. The next event we see in Sanders biography, is his election as Mayor of Burlington in 1981, at the age of 41.

A Mother Jones article goes in depth in his early political era:

Sanders had reason for introspection. He was struggling financially — a newspaper article during his 1974 race noted that he was running for office while on unemployment. His income came from sporadic carpentry and freelance articles, which made paying bills on time a constant struggle. Sanders, now single, was helping to raise a young son, and living in a city in which the working poor lacked access to daycare. Increasingly, Sanders’ political gaze was focusing on his own backyard.

Nothing wrong with introspection, living in Vermont and arguing the nuance of the “revolution” and how sexual repression causes cancer, but the meme of a side by side of Sanders and Clinton in the 60’s is just a flat out lie.

Having lived at that time, I chose the Clinton trajectory. Got involved in community development and affordable housing, while some I knew lived outside of the cities, the epicenter of the struggles, and pontificated on the ideal revolution. Yes, we were two factions and yes we did choose different paths. And yes, it irks me when the “pontificators” from the sidelines call us who chose to work in government, non-profits and other areas lesser than “progressives”. We worked in the system and we were leftie. We made changes in peoples quality of life. In delivering better services, fighting in courts and walking the walk and we still do.

While Clinton spent the 60’s and 70’s living in the midst of this political and social, struggle and took leadership in children’s rights, worked on the campaigns of McGovern and built her political chops, Sanders was yelling from the margins with the other Liberty Union Party members on abstractions. Clinton was working on issues and creating changes that we take for granted now, particularly in children’s rights. Her research on Children’s rights changed the entire direction of how we speak about children and how the law treats them. It was not trivial work ladies league work, it was fundemental in how we changed our legal and social view of children as citizens.

An American Bar Association chair later said, “Her articles were important, not because they were radically new but because they helped formulate something that had been inchoate.”

My question is: Mr. Sanders, what did you really do in the 60’s and 70’s other than go to some demonstrations. Twenty years of lounging and introspection. Perfectly fine, but don’t distort it into a resume of activisim . We had different paths to our activism, I side with one path. I actually had and have little respect for your path, but that is besides the point.

Sanders basically spent all the 60’s and the 70’s, twenty years of the peak of social change in the backwoods with people like himself . Did he work for McCarthy? McGovern? No, because he was engaged with other political parties.

Did he fight for the rights of poor people to have free legal representation? I am sure that he was noble and true to some ideal, but when Hillary was chairing the board of the Legal Services Corporation and fighting for their funding to increase, lives changed throughout America.

What did Sanders do in the 60’s and the 70’s? To have people from the left so obviously diminish a woman’s core work into one picture and one event from her life is not only sexist, it’s degrading to the term progressive.