Article by Ravenstorm Labarcon

It’d be over an hour and a half of waiting just to get in and there was no guarantee they’d let us through. Parking was ten dollars.

So said the parking attendant at Cal Expo.

“You still want to do it?” she asked my friend Peter, who was driving the car.

We did, so we parked at the Hobby Lobby across the street and saved the money for food. We’d be hungry, after all, as we were going to spend the next several hours standing alongside thousands of our fellow community members to show our support for democratic hopeful Bernie Sanders.

The media says he’ll never make it, but we showed up anyway. I read on the news that there were between ten and twenty thousand of us, but estimates vary.

It was a lot of people.

The line was long enough for us not to know where it ended, but we waited all the same. It moved in chunks. Five minutes would pass, and a wave of movement would ripple through the crowd. Five minutes. Another ripple. Maybe it was ten minutes. Another 40 feet forward, anyway.

Waiting with us was an interesting slice of the local community. Kaleidoscopic. Veterans and college students with dyed hair and stern businesspeople and late-twenties couples and single parents with little kids. A colorful crowd decorated with suits, hoodies, turbans, and American-flag short shorts. Volunteers moved along the line registering people to vote and volunteer in turn as they spoke with hopeful smiles about the future. Thumbs tapped out messages for the world to see while thousands of cameras took thousands of pictures. The line hummed with conversation.

The sun had set by the time we approached the field where Bernie was speaking, and the stadium overflowed with excited applause. A faint echo of Sanders’s voice made its way to the waiting crowd through the speakers of smartphones as several people streamed live footage of the speech. Not wanting to miss out on a moment of what they came for, friends and strangers alike huddled just a little closer together and peered over each other’s shoulders for a better look at the man on the glowing screens.

As we walked into the stadium, Bernie was a barely-visible smudge of person up on stage, dwarfed by a crowd of thousands. We’d arrived in time to hear the last half hour of his speech, and in that time he touched on several topics of particular interest to me. He spoke about investing in American infrastructure and prison reform. About rebuilding our inner cities and giving health care to all Americans. Notably, he talked about education–about how the demand for an education and the consequences of pursuing one have changed drastically over the years. About how he wants to shift the load back off of the students and back onto the state.

“We should not be punishing people for getting a higher education. We should be rewarding them.”

Damn straight. Nowadays, it takes education to get work, money to get education, and work to get money. Students are digging themselves deeper into debt than ever before just to attain a modicum of security. To work a reasonable number of hours every day and still have food and water and to be able to see a doctor when they get sick. To have a home and the possibility of raising a family.

He also talked about making this happen by taxing those who can afford it. We pay taxes, why shouldn’t everyone? Why should those privileged beyond the common comprehension not be required to pay into the common pot? The idea makes sense on such a basic level that I find it hard to wrap my head around why it’s not like that already.

It’s one thing to hear about the popular support for Bernie Sanders, but another thing entirely to experience it. I figured that seeing him speak in person would be the best part of the rally, but walking out, I came to realize that it wasn’t the words of the senator that had excited me, but seeing him receive so much support from so many people. It was hearing rapt, powerful applause for ideas I agree with. It was the reassurance that political participation isn’t a dead cause.

Far from it, actually. It’s quite apparent to me now that this isn’t going away anytime soon.

And it’s quite apparent that it’s bigger than Bernie.

The guy didn’t invent worker’s rights or green energy or health care reform or civil liberties. We, the people, want those things, and Bernie Sanders projects to us the promise of opportunity to make those things a reality. He’s the first prominent populist voice in American politics this century, and the ongoing support for his campaign is a reflection of the building momentum and prominence of progressive, people-centric ideas in our modern political consciousness.

We don’t specifically want a Sanders Administration, we want change.

When I yelled and applauded at the rally, I wasn’t yelling and applauding to support Bernie personally. I was there to show my support for that line and that crowd, that stadium full of people and the millions of other Americans who agree that change must happen. I could look around me and really feel that these are the people to whom my decision makes a difference. These are the people whose decision makes a difference to me.

We are the people, the economy, the culture, and the government, and we have a responsibility to each other to care. Our collective actions define our collective future, and as issues like socioeconomic inequity and corporate meddling become more and more pressing, apathy is becoming less and less of an option.

The California Democratic Primary is June 7th. Go vote.