Life Under Sanders or Clinton

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HsDDkG9dIgQ

 

Today, is a really big super Tuesday, with 5 states conducting primaries. I cast an early vote last week, and was surprised that there was actually a waiting line. I admit I didn’t ask anyone in the line how they were voting!

For the Dems, this means Clinton or Sanders. Let’s take a look at life under both of these presidencies.

 Life Under Cliton

Consuelo

She has never met a war she didn’t like.

We Latinos are only a voting block for her.

Tom

Did she ever fight in the Mideast? Did she ever meet a Jihadist face to face? I did. We can’t continue being the world’s cop.

Dawn

I would love to see a woman as president.

But not this woman. Give me a woman who mean what she says. Give me a true progressive like Elizabeth Warren.

Leandra

I read blogs, I read sites, I read and read opinions and I get out there and take it all in. And you know what? We Americans really are a crossroad – as a people, a culture, a society, and I think I need to go deeper underground.

Richard

OMG, she’s beautiful, Clinton is just beautiful. She really loves us Wall Street guys because we’ve funded her Superpacs to the max and she is going to make life much easier for us, yes indeed. Hello, Hummer redux. Hello, tax loopholes. Hello, hello.

 Life Under Sanders

Consuelo

I may be living in an alternative universe. I clearly remember a dream where my abuelita was taken away by the Guardia. She has lived here for forty-eight years as an undocumented immigrant from Mexico, who cleans houses, raised three kids, and has five grandchildren. I’m 31, the oldest among them, and I know what I dreamed.

And yet, today my abuelita and I drove over to a federal office with all her documents – when she came here, why she came here, what she has earned since she came here, the taxes she has paid in her forty-eight years in this country. She had photos, journal entries, notarized statements from her children, grandchildren, employers…And at the end of three hours, she was granted residency.

She and I and the rest of the family and our friends, more than seventy of us, celebrated in a local park. It turned into a press extravaganza, with a parade down Calle Ocho in Little Havana.

Is it too good to be true? Are we now living in a new dream, a new story?

Tom

I was going to enlist because I thought it was the only way I could find a job. And then the election happened and over time we began to withdraw troops from the Mideast, even from South Korea. I realized that if I could get into the architecture program at the University of Florida, my tuition would be free.

I spent months studying for the SATs and compiling a portfolio of my best designs for alternative-fueled buildings. In April, I was accepted at UF, and now here I am. I still pay for the dorm and for my food, but that’s a fraction of what my tuition costs would have been in the times before. That’s how I think of it: the Times Before and the Times After. It feels apocalyptic, but in a good way.

To cover my vastly reduced expenses, I work part-time at this fast food joint and make the minimum wage – 15 bucks an hour.

In Times Before, this job paid about half that. Instead of paying $300 a month for health insurance that kept denying me coverage for this or that, I pay a $5 co-pay for everything. And hey, I’ve always been healthy and the few times I went to a walk-in clinic with the flu or whatever, the drug I needed cost several hundred bucks. Now, I can get that same drug for my $5 co-pay.

Am I happier? More productive? More creative? More compassionate toward the plight of the people with whom I share space on this incredible planet? You bet.

Dawn

I’m 28 years old. White female. I have a college degree in English. I teach at a public university in Asheville, North Carolina, where I earn more than $86,000 a year. An amazing wage for  a teacher. I have no college debt, of course, because my tuition was free, and I was able to work part-time and pay for my other expenses.

My husband, an engineer, and I are thinking about starting a family. We can afford to do it now because we have universal health care. When my mother had me, it cost her and my dad nearly ten grand. Jake and I will pay nothing. Plus, I’ll get four months of paid maternity leave and he’ll get four months of paternity leave. If we stagger it, our child will be nearly a year old by then and will qualify for in home care. That cost is 50/50.

Yeah, we pay higher taxes. But you know what? I don’t care. Everyone is paying higher taxes, even the corporations, the uber wealthy, and the benefits to the rest of us are great.

If this is a dream, never wake me up, okay?

Leandra

For the first time in my life, I feel hope for people of color. I feel the way my mother did when she marched with King back in the early sixties, when her buddy Rosa Parks refused to move to the back of the bus. I feel the way many of us did when Obama was elected to the presidency. But he was up against such an intractable congress that he couldn’t implement many of the things he promised. Or maybe so many of us were beaten down by the years under W that Obama looked like the progressive that he wasn’t.

When Obama came to our city, I waited in line for four hours to hear him and Biden speak. I was riveted, buoyed, and sobbed the night he swept the election. And then the reality set in, that he could only do so much. I have a theory, see, that these newly elected presidents are shown the Zapruder clip of the JFK assassination,  and are told, Tow the line or else. But I don’t think Bernie was intimidated by this film. I think he looked at it with that wry expression and then said, “Really, dudes? Well, bring it on.”

And they didn’t bring it on because the old scare tactics don’t work anymore.

Richard

Holy shittin’ hell. My attorney says I need to cut my losses and run.

And he means it literally. You got money parked in the Caymans, Rich? Then head down there and live the high life because if you stay in the U.S., you’re going to find your ass in prison. They’re indicting the Wall Street crowd that brought the country to its knees in 2007. Bush, Cheney, Wolfowitz, Yoo, and most of Wall Street.

Even if I stay here and somehow evade prosecution, I’ll be paying my employees 15 bucks an hour and will have to pay for maternity leave and paternity leave, and I’ll have to abide by federal regulations. My tax loopholes have vanished.

I sold my Hummer two weeks ago for 300 bucks, to an outfit that takes the spare parts to fix other Hummers. I had to take my kids out of private school because the tuition was so high. But next year, she’ll be going to Florida State tuition free. The social security my parents have been collecting for the last three years has risen and it galls me because I’m funding it. Me and people like me – you, you, you.