No one puts a scarf on my head but me. It’s my choice—one protected by the first amendment. And this is not the last ban I’m going to work to lift.  Rep.-elect Ilhan Omar,

Cognitive dissonance is Republican commentators stalking, doctoring, + editing my casual livestreams out of context in order to sow doubt in my intelligence, all while blindly supporting a man who thinks our greatest defense against forest fires is: A Rake. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

What I really like about both Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar, is that they are not afraid to be unabashedly themselves. For somebody my age, 78, being myself is still a struggle but it seems to come naturally to these young women. They both come from the bottom rung of the Middle Class; they didn’t starve growing up but there was no money for the luxuries most of us – but not most people – consider necessities and these are the people they want to represent.  In my opinion, these are the people who have to be represented if we are going to survive as a functional democracy.  

Ocasio-Cortez has a hyperactive Twitter presence where she “shares moments of excitement and pride at the incredible privilege of being new to Congress” (to quote from an article by a young, but older, Latina who has spent her life trying to fit into – she doesn’t identify it this way but I will – the white patriarchy of Washington). Much of what Ocasio-Cortez shares is logistics – because that’s what most of life is, after all – and that has given the right-wing media lots to go after. When she tweeted about how expensive rent is in DC and that she couldn’t afford to get an apartment until she started getting her Congressional paycheck which wouldn’t happen until January. Some right-wing pundit retweeted with a snarky comment along the line of You should have thought about saving some money before you came to Washinton. Ocasio-Cortez wasn’t phased, she tweeted back: There is no reason to be ashamed or embarrassed. Mocking lower incomes is exactly how those who benefit from + promote wealth inequality the most keep everyday people silent about 1 of the worst threats to American society: that the rich are getting richer and the poor, poorer. What the snarker didn’t get is that most people can’t live in Washington DC and they relate to that tweet.

More importantly is that even with that background – or, perhaps, because of it – both Omar and Ocasio-Cortez think that Global Warming is our biggest threat and they don’t want it buried in the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology (which over the last several administrations has done nothing). When Ocasio-Cortez tweets People are going to die if we don’t start addressing climate change ASAP. It’s not enough to think it’s “important.” We must make it urgent. That’s why we need a Select Committee on a Green New Deal, & why fossil fuel-funded officials shouldn’t be writing climate change policy. she is challenging the traditions that keep the powerful in power, she is challenging the Democratic-house hierarchy and that takes guts. And she challenging it in the area that it most needs challenging, in my view. Like Bernie, Ocasio-Cortez is defined by the establishment media as an unrealistic spender who wants programs we can’t afford, but, like Bernie, her first priority is climate change and its devastating impacts (to quote the just-released Fourth National Climate Assessment which is clear that we are in real trouble).  

As an aside, climate change and its devastating impacts is my core issue, that’ what drew me to Bernie Sanders in the first place. There are lots of things that Bernie has suggested and pushed such as free college, Single Payer Health Insurance, and a living wage that match my personal values, but these are only my values and, while I think they would make this a better place to live, that is only what I think. Climate Change is different, climate change is real, it is a fact, and it is starting to destroy this planet as our home. This is not theoretical, this is real, it is already starting. End aside. 

I want to end, however, on the happy note, for me at least, that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar, are already changing the world (or, maybe, they are just tuned into the change that is already happening). A lot of that is that, like Trump, they are bypassing the usual channels – the progress is slow, follow the rules, our rules, filter – by using social media. One tweet exchange that I especially got a kick out of was with Lindsey Graham. When Ocasio-Cortez tweeted about the immigrant families trying to find safe harbor into the US by saying  Asking to be considered a refuge & applying for status isn’t a crime. It wasn’t for Jewish families fleeing Germany. It wasn’t for targeted families fleeing Rawanda. It wasn’t for communities fleeing war-torn Syria. And it isn’t for those fleeing violence in Central America.

The net, Twittersphere went into a frenzy of anger, one of the angry people, Lindsey Graham, tried to put her in her place, saying I recommend she take a tour of the Holocaust Museum in DC. Might help her better understand the differences between the Holocaust and the caravan in Tijuana.

I’m not sure of the order of these next two tweets so I’m just arbitrarily putting Ocasio-Cortez first: @LindseyGrahamSC, the point of such a treasured museum is to bring its lessons to present day. This administration has jailed children and violated human rights. Perhaps we should stop pretending that authoritarianism + violence is a historical event instead of a growing force. 

About three hours after Graham’s tweet, the Auschwitz Museum tweeted: When we look at  Auschwitz we see the end of the process. It’s important to remember that the Holocaust actually did not start from gas chambers. This hatred gradually developed from words, stereotypes & prejudice through legal exclusion, dehumanisation & escalating violence.

I want to say that I didn’t imagine a future of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortezes and her ilk. I thought, I hoped, that change would come from the Gavin Newsom generation. It never occurred to me that it would take an entirely new generation of activists to be brave enough to really fight for change and not just talk about it. 

We write unlimited blank checks for war, we JUST wrote a 2 trillion dollar check for the GOP tax cut and NOBODY asks those folks how are they gonna pay for it. So my question is why are our pockets only empty when it comes to education and healthcare for our kids? Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

I’m a radical, but I tell my students at Queens, I try not to soapbox. I want to be on the left wing of the possible. Michael Harrington, a founder of the Democratic Socialists of America. 

The Left Wing of the Possible is also the title of an interesting and very complimentary article on Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the Democratic Socialist phenom from the Bronx, in the New Yorker (interestingly, the same article is entitled Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Historic Win and the Future of the Democratic Party in the online edition). The article is by David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker since 1998, who wrote a very favorable article on Barrack Obama in 2007, painting him as a centrist, that was instrumental in my getting on the Obama bandwagon. As with most New Yorker articles, it is about 75% context, so, if you are at all interested in politics, I suggest you give it a read.

Ocasio-Ortega is running on a platform that, the article points out, is not that radical. She is running on a platform that includes single-payer health insurance, a minimum wage of $15, equal rights for women and minorities, and free college,  but, to quote Bernie: “not the government taking over industry”. As the article title suggests, she wants what she thinks is possible. I think it is possible, too and, I don’t understand why I often read the opposite from the Democratic establishment. Taking a hypothetical Trump voter – who voted for Trump because they don’t like income inequality or are afraid that their middle-class life will not be there for their kids, not a Trump voter who voted for him because they think he is a racist – I think they are more likely to vote for somebody who is pushing free college rather than somebody who is pushing  we will significantly cut interest rates for future undergraduates because we believe that making college more affordable is…important.

I don’t think that the Democratic voter base, including many Trump voters – many of whom also voted for Obama – are against free college and single-payer health care, for that matter, I think the Democratic corporate base is. I think that, if the Democrats want to win back Congress, they are going to have to start listening to the Alexandria Ocasio-Cortezes, not just their rich financial contributors.  

As an aside, after WWII, education at state colleges was virtually free and remained so at the University of California until 1970 when a $150 “education” fee was added. Now the tuition fee is  $14,460. As an aside to the aside, I don’t think it is a coincidence that, as the number of minorities has gone up at Cal, so has the tuition. I think the governmental and educational infrastructure, consciously or unconsciously, just doesn’t think educating people of color is as important as it was when most of the students were white. End aside. 

Republicans have blown this deficit up to places one couldn’t even imagine it could go: a statement by Senator Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) who still voted for the 2019 military budget of approximately 716 billion dollars.

While the press – and, correspondingly, the people who rely on the press for information, that’s us – have been watching the Trump Administration put children in cages, a bi-partisan Congress has voted for a new military budget. A military budget that includes a boost in defense spending of approximately 82 billion dollars for next year. To put that in perspective, the increase just voted on is bigger than the entire Russian military budget which was 69.2 billion dollars last year (according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute).

Think about that for a second, the increase of the United States’ military budget, next year over this year, is bigger than Russia’s entire military budget. Lest you think that this is all the nasty Republicans’ fault, the 2019 military budget was a bi-partisan effort with only ten Senators voting against it and two of the Ney voters were Republicans (Mike Lee and Paul Rand). I am glad to say that both of California’s Senators, as well as Elizabeth Warren and Kirsten Gillibrand, voted Nay. I wasn’t surprised that Bernie voted Nay, but I am surprised Cory Booker voted Yea for the increase, seeing as how he is rumored to be running for President. 

It is interesting to note that the Department of Education estimates that free college – belittled by much of the political establishment, on both sides of the aisle, as being unaffordable –  would cost about 62.6 billion dollars, about 20 billion dollars less than the one year increase for our already bloated military. In my opinion, this is a good measure of our National Values and it is hard for me not to get enraged.