Stepping outside my door today, I stopped, struck by the beauty of the blossoms on one the bush that lines our walkway. I don't even know its name, or the name of its blossoms. Most of the year it never blooms, standing there with its stiff, lanceolate shaped leaves hanging down, often curled in around the edges, looking a bit sad and forlorn. But when it does bloom, it's magnificent. So I took this photograph with my phone:

And it struck me, that much like this bush, our democracy has lain dormant, dying because we have failed to nurture and protect it. We've hardly noticed the sad state of its disrepair, benumbed by all the events of the past thirty years. Oh we made a great noises at times, but ones that echo the words Shakespeare placed into the mouth of Macbeth, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. We marched against Bush's wars, we campaigned for the lesser of two evil politicians, we cast our votes out of fear or anger, and perhaps just once upon a time based on empty promises of hope and change.

All this time, while we were being distracted, economic royalists, as FDR rightly named them some 80 years ago have stolen from us our security, our livelihoods, our homes, our health, our dignity and often our very lives so they could make selfish profits out of our degradation and misery. The speech he gave in Philadelphia on June 27, 1936, when he accepted the presidential nomination of the Democratic Party, are just as relevant today as when he spoke them then:

And so it was to win freedom from the tyranny of political autocracy that the American Revolution was fought. [...] Political tyranny was wiped out at Philadelphia on July 4, 1776. Since that struggle, however, man's inventive genius released new forces in our land which reordered the lives of our people. The age of machinery, of railroads; of steam and electricity; the telegraph and the radio; mass production, mass distribution—all of these combined to bring forward a new civilization and with it a new problem for those who sought to remain free. For out of this modern civilization economic royalists carved new dynasties. New kingdoms were built upon concentration of control over material things. Through new uses of corporations, banks and securities, new machinery of industry and agriculture, of labor and capital-all undreamed of by the fathers—the whole structure of modern life was impressed into this royal service. [...] It was natural and perhaps human that the privileged princes of these new economic dynasties, thirsting for power, reached out for control over Government itself. They created a new despotism and wrapped it in the robes of legal sanction. In its service new mercenaries sought to regiment the people, their labor, and their property. And as a result the average man once more confronts the problem that faced the Minute Man. The hours men and women worked, the wages they received, the conditions of their labor—these had passed beyond the control of the people, and were imposed by this new industrial dictatorship. The savings of the average family, the capital of the small business man, the investments set aside for old age—other people's money—these were tools which the new economic royalty used to dig itself in.

What once was has come around again. History, if it does not exactly repeat itself, it certainly plays variations on the same old themes. After a generation that saw themselves uplifted out of poverty and oppression, we as a nation grew lax and failed to take actions to safeguard the gains that so many fought, and some died for. Thus, for years we have allowed ourselves to be divided along lines of race, gender, religion, age and class by the cynical machinations of the powerful, amoral and obscenely wealthy elites who control both the Republican and Democratic parties.

But not this year. This year the scales have fallen away from our eyes, and the full rot of our political process, the ugly, greedy face of the our two party monopoly, has been exposed for all who refuse to turn away from the sight of its decay. It only took one good man, Bernie Sanders, to stand up and defy the Clintons, the most powerful, most politically corrupt family in our times, and to defy the full power of the Democratic Party establishment that had aligned themselves behind Hillary Clinton before Bernie Sanders even announced he would run.

Well, that and the public display of hubris by the woman who believed the Presidency is a sinecure to which she is entitled, rather than a sacred office, one that demands service to we, the people, and not the doling out of faovrs for those few who showered her and her family with bribes and other "gifts" that come with golden strings. So, thank you, too, Hillary Clinton, for all that you've done to make us finally realize just how corrupt and despotic our government, and the elite politicians who control it, have truly become.

We now see the depths to which the powers that be in the Democratic party will reach to deny voters a choice. They have promoted their anointed favorite, Hillary Clinton, who is nothing more than a neoconservative defense hawk and warmonger and the candidate chosen by billionaires, mega-corporations, Wall Street criminals and dictatorial regimes around the globe to ensure that they retain control of our government. At every turn they have sought to sabotage her only viable opponent, Bernie Sanders, a man who has fought his entire political career for the principles and values to which the Democratic Party paid mere lip service as they sold us down the river, beginning with the Presidency of Bill Clinton.

Tomorrow, over millions of people may vote in the primaries, the most important of which is the one in California. I expect Bernie Sanders to prevail in California and several other states, even as evidence of voter irregularities that suppress the very people likely to vote for Bernie surfaces once again. But whatever happens, Sanders has vowed to take his campaign all the way to the convention, and I believe him.

On July 24th, he will hold a rally after a march to FDR Park organized by March on the DNC. A myriad of other groups will be holding rallies, marches and even a People's Convention, to pass a People's Platform with a progressive agenda that delegates will bring to the floor of the Democratic National Convention.

Meanwhile, Brand New Congress is organizing to support progressive candidates. Jill Stein and the Green party has come out and openly supported Bernie in California, and made overtures to him to run as their candidate should Hillary Clinton, despite ongoing FBI investigations and the threat of an indictment, be nominated by the Dems.

This movement will not end if Bernie isn't nominated or elected President. It has come too far to fade away. As I said earlier, too many eyes have been opened, too many people are engaged in the fight to regain our democracy and take it back from the oligarchs.

I'm no prophet, but it doesn't take a seer or a psychic to understand that fundamental changes have occurred in our country over the last year. People are awake to the reality that our two party system is a rigged game , one which they will never be invited to play, whether they are on the right or the left. Whatever happens, that knowledge is out now, and it can't be stuffed back into the former lock box that both the Democrats and Republicans, and their paymasters, once kept tightly shut. Despite the parties and the oligarchs control of the corporate media, and so many other levers of institutional power, this political movement will continue. Some may choose to work on the inside to change our corrupt system, while others will choose to attack it from the outside. Either way, I will support them.

And even though Bill Clinton bombastically proclaimed that all of us, Sanders supporters and progressive activists alike, will be toast tomorrow, his boast rings hollow to me. Call it a movement or a revolution or whatever you like, but those of us who are involved in it are not going to slink back into the shadows and simply take whatever meager crumbs our betters are willing dole out to us, while they eat cake.

We refuse to watch them burn down the planet so the fossil fuel industry and terrorist supporting despotic regimes can thrive. We are sick of seeing people imprisoned so private interests can turn a buck, and we don't want private corporations running our education system with payments from our tax dollars. And all of us resist the continuance of our police-surveillance state, where thinking the wrong thoughts, saying the wrong things, having the wrong color skin, worshiping the wrong religion or loving the wrong people may lead to your imprisonment or being killed out of hand with only a thin veneer of jurisprudence to cover up the gross injustice. In short, we are no longer willing to get with the program, because the program is evil.

So, whatever comes next, we will no longer close our eyes, or cover our ears, or numb ourselves to sleep at night with hopes for a better future based on all the lies and half-truths we've been fed. Those days are over my brothers and sisters.

Solidarity, my friends. Solidarity now and in the days to come.

Steven D