Letter from Morgantown, West Virginia: On the Ground at Bernie Sanders' Rally of the Sick

Even though a majority of West Virginians see government health care as fundamentally un-American, even evil, they know the Affordable Care Act is saving lives every day.

SARAH MENKEDICK 27 MINUTES AGO


Excerpt:

Here was the quasi-religious rhetoric that seemed to invite the larger West Virginian audience to listen: Rusty spoke about how "the natural response when you're in a dark place is to look for any little pinhole of light.... But what I realized was, those pinholes don't exist ... until you realize that you are the light. You light that darkness up." The room was cheering and clapping, and people were pushing closer to the stage. "If we work together and we stand up for each other, we'll light it up. And that's what has to happen!"

Bernie emerged and was utterly Bernie, his Brooklyn brogue like a trusty and lovable car going up and down the same trodden hills. He spoke of the massive transfer of wealth from the working class to the richest people in the country. He cited the numbers, making them stories whose bottom line was grotesque greed. His twin themes were the pummeling of the working class and the moral outrage of the initial incarnation, dubbed "Trumpcare," of several Republican attempts to repeal the ACA. "What happens to you if you have cancer, heart disease, diabetes, or any other life-threatening illness and you cannot afford to go to the doctor?" he asked the crowd, and from around the room came shouts: "You die! You die! You die!"

In that conference room was a scene that seemed both distinctly American—a grassroots, informal camaraderie amid the confessing of intimacies; a worship of individual possibility and story—and profoundly contrary to the persistent American belief in the ability of any one person to triumph independent of community. To create political change in West Virginia, the activists, leaders, and citizens in that room would have to reconcile these disparate ideals: the cherished independence of the individual, and the individual's fundamental dependence on American institutions that have no clear mandate to value his or her life.

Afterward, my husband, daughter, and I took a walk along the riverfront in Morgantown and stumbled onto a bluegrass concert. The day settled into a peach-yellow dusk as families danced in front of the stage, the river swirling behind them. I had a vision of another America, where people did not have to stand up on Sunday morning to reveal their tragedies, where crowds were not chanting, "You die! You die!" It was a vision that didn't hold long: Heading back to the car, we spotted one young man passed out under a bridge, another crumpled in front of a restroom. In the days, weeks, and months to come, Congress would struggle to pass one destructive health-care measure after another in spite of widespread opposition, and Bernie would introduce his plan for universal health care. Nothing would come to feel more certain, everything would become more divisive. Meanwhile, people did the little they could: stand up, tell their stories, confess their vulnerability before a government that every day seemed more distant from the needs of its people.

https://psmag.com/magazine/letter-from-morgantown-west-virginia-on-the-ground-at-bernie-sanders-rally-of-the-sick