Jaron Summers © 2015
I am not going to make the same mistake with Bernie as I did with hippies. I’m talking about presidential candidate Bernie Sanders and the hippies of the sixties who were like today’s millennium kids except the hippies didn’t rip their jeans and shred their shirts in a failed attempt to set up a new counter culture. The hippies ripped off their jeans and F**KED. Each other. And the status quo. In the late 60s I was editor of BYU’s daily newspaper. It was probably the most conservative school on the planet and the LDS campus paper reflected that philosophy. Many people thought little old liberal me was lucky to get my BA without getting lynched. The noose came close but the reports of my hanging were somewhat exaggerated. Sorry but I am getting ahead of myself. Sorry again but I will now really get ahead of myself. Prediction: Bernie Sanders will be the next President of these United States come 2016. There will be three reasons. Hillary Clinton. Social Media. And the top one percenters. Hillary Clinton seems the one to beat. Poor and tragic Hillary won’t have a hope for two reasons which are the opposite of each other. 1. Americans won’t make a woman President who stays married to a scoundrel like Bill Clinton. 2. Americans won’t vote for a woman who divorces a scoundrel like Bill Clinton. Which means she is checkmated. Toast. The Republicans will be swept out of office by the bucket load. It’s a failed circus with spiteful monkeys flipping feces at each other. If you’re old enough to remember living through the Vietnam, uh, Conflict, then you know all about hippies. Crazy movement that started in San Francisco that no one knew much about in the summer of 1967… so on my way to a summer internship at the Edmonton Journal, I checked out the scene in Haight Ashbury. My conclusion: The hippie movement was a tiny blimp of social nonsense that wouldn’t make much of an impact on anything – was I wrong! The love children became a grass roots phenomena that exploded. Millions of young people demanded social change. The movement helped end the Vietnam conflict that took over 50,000 American lives. I never saw the impact of the hippies coming. But I caught the moment when Bernie Sanders swore on national TV and assured himself the presidency. Defending Hillary in the first Democratic Debate he said we don’t want to hear any more about these damn emails. We have critical issues. Bingo. We have a winner. Bernie Sanders leapt from Bernie the candidate, to Bernie the statesman. Now for the second reason: Social Media, which Bernie seems a bit baffled by, will galvanize the nation and sweep him into the White House. Facebook and Twitter are leading the charge. Suddenly Bernie is a household, make that worldhold name. In olden days a grass roots campaign would have needed a year for Bernie to rise to the top. Now he’s done it overnight. If Abe Lincoln had a FB account we might not have had the Civil War. Yep, things are a changing thanks to technology. Forget 15 minutes of fame. The new mantra of the digital era is you can be famous forever in 15 seconds. No wonder the top one tenth percenters are edgy. They’re the third reason Bernie is going order pancakes every morning for four years at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Note to both the idle and active rich: If you have a billion bucks be terrified. Bernie is going wear you like ripped jeans.
