As a young actress in the late 1930s, when I was a kid around town looking for acting jobs, everyone was looking to get America straightened out. Jobs were hard to find, if not impossible and there were breadlines on Broadway. We were young and we thought we could get this country straightened out. Many young people in those days signed the Communist Manifesto. Most of them weren’t communists but they fell for the idea of making everything work, of promises made but never to be kept.
Roosevelt ameliorated the situation by creating the Works Progress Administration (WPA) that employed millions of unemployed people (mostly unskilled men) to carry out projects like the construction of public buildings and roads, the Public Works Administration (PWA) that addressed the infrastructure problems, the Social Security Administration (SSA), the Resettlement Administration (RA) that helped relocate struggling urban and rural families to planned communities which later became the Department of Agriculture and numerous other paths to employment. These were some of the needed and necessary corrections to the capitalistic system. We need to do that again!
But jumping on the Bernie Sanders bandwagon of promises does not tell you how to get from here to there. Voting for Bernie Sanders is not the answer. He does not tell you that you will have to pay for those dreams— not just the rich and wealthy but also the poor and hungry. He does not tell you that you have to vote for a unified Democratic Congress and Senate if you really want to see changes made. Without doing this, without your vote for the right members of Congress, Bernie Sanders will get nothing at all done. You may follow him down the path of broken dreams or you can get out there and vote for a reformed Congress and Senate.
So get the support of a Democratic Congress and choose a candidate who knows how to get it done. Someone with the knowledge, the background and the connections to make real change instead of just empty dreams. Get out there men, women, girls, boys! Make it your business to know which members of the Congress and the Senate you need to vote for. Make your dreams come true instead of falling for empty promises.