Bernie's hit the trail again to talk about what he thinks is important, and to clue us in that voting for someone just because they're a woman is a dead-end, while blacks should be more concerned about social repression than racial.

Since we had a whole season to get irritated with Bern-splaynin', and we just lost an important election over something we still don't understand, we should take his words for what they are - a cry for help.

Identity takes many forms. If we look at Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, we see different levels of what we require, issues that concern us. But ironically, as we rise up the pyramid, the new level is just as important as the lower more basic. It's why doing without a cell phone for the day can be just as unsettling as not having food - our needs evolve and we lose sight of the earlier needs as they're handled and subsumed.

A 14-year-old's need to see her friends at the mall can be just as real as the need to sleep. We call this "adolescence", but we see over and over again that there's nothing that special about teenage maintenance vs. other periods - we just label the later vicarious ones as "grownup", however infantile and irrational in proper perspective. (Time and again we see lists of "common knowledge" myths debunked, but we're not about to absorb a more faithful view of reality as one might expect - the sun will always "set", we will never cop to our part of the world just spinning away from it.

So back to identity - Bernie has one. It's different from you and I and the other and so on. It's been great fun talking about "white privilege", but it's simply another identity, and less monolithic than we like to pretend. From some piece from Digby a couple of months ago, a survey of different ethnic groups' needs showed great difference in issues, but also very different placement on Maslow's Hierarchy. Why this should surprise us, I'm not sure, but it seemed to surprise her. I'm white, male, reasonably though not excessively well off, and yet I worry. A black man, whether successful or not, will likely have more to worry about than me as the chance that a sudden piece of insult or injustice or violence will jump up to bite him is much greater. But probably we worry about the same amount, though over different things. A woman dealing with her job, kids, various kinds of discrimination, annoying assumptions ("can I speak to your boss?") probably feels more pressure. But we probably in our heads think we're under the same pressure.

Bernie lives in a largely secular, non-threatening world, except for the vicissitudes of economy, changing fortunes, class distinction - and these issues become most important for him. He's caring and considerate, but he's largely blind to other people's concerns that don't parallel his. I once had a black homeless guy try to bum a buck from me, and when I refused, he looked at my rusted out 20-year-old van and said, "oh, I see where you're coming from". In that comment, he piled all his racial, economic, social grudges, bitterness and daily worries and saw my ride as the equivalent of what I'd see in a Maserati. It's not that he was blind - *I* was blind at the time - I thought it was funny and ironic. I didn't realize it's how we *all* view the world, just in his context rather than mine.

We understand Bernie's identity better than Republicans', some more closely than others. But we don't fathom that our concern over transgender bathrooms and pipelines in Dakota are just as self-referential as the right's fear about Christmas being under attack. Yeah, you can say one is more hyped and one more real - but then you're missing the identity underneath those issues, the "who we are means whether we're concerned", and why something silly like Christmas-under-attack can be pumped up to a serious, hyperventilating concern. We don't understand the people under these concerns, just like Bernie doesn't understand the woman or the black or Hispanic outside his context of class-conscious social justice warrior, nor do many conservatives or rural voters understand us.

But Bernie's message largely resonated with many of these rural audiences, certainly in juxtaposition with Hillary's perceived friendliness to Wall Street. There's a good deal of "luck of the draw" though - rural people in Iowa export much of their produce abroad, enjoying the fruits of "free trade", while those in Michigan have seen jobs go to non-union southern states (yep, free trade/movement of labor & goods) along with south of the border and overseas. And Donald as a billionaire who "doesn't need the money" but grabs it anyway makes an unlikely improvement over a Hillary who gives speeches. But it doesn't matter so much, because both groups *feel* that Bernie is matching them on the Hierarchy of Needs, just as his anti-coal/anti-fossil fuel message didn't matter that much in West Virginia. There's something of a protest vote and something of perceiving a kindred spirit.

The danger of our Big Tent is stressing conformity rather than a more subtle meeting and accommodating and evolving diversity. The case of gay marriage is illustrative here - pretty much *no one*, gay or straight, thought of gay marriage as a real possibility 40 years ago, and even in the gay community, it wasn't even that desirable for many (I don't have the stats, only anecdotal). So somewhere over the last 40 years, pretty much *everyone* evolved somehow on the issue - even staunch conservatives have come a long way from anti-gay Anita Bryant days, civil unions are unobjectionable to most, many are fine with a non-church wedding, and it's only an official God-or-church-ordained marriage that's an affront to most of the more conservative. The issue has moved an incredible amount in a short period of time. Yet our tolerance of where people are on this scale varies greatly based on our identities and outlooks, and even the *timing* of that evolution has various import to some. In short, it's a litmus test as much as a need filled, injustice righted, a prism through which to view others.

We are largely oblivious to these prisms of others. We often think we're arguing in facts, that we're winning through details, but often to the other side(s), just our fighting is a sign that they're right, or maybe they don't even notice what we're doing, or some other reaction/non-reaction.

Presumably most of us know this:

but we don't believe it when it comes to other people. Except when Hillary uses too verbose, issue wonk language. We think everyone hear's the same, but I'm pretty positive most conservatives will take my favorite RFK "tears of Aeschylus" and MLK "these people aren't bad" speeches and hear them completely different, take away very different impressions, just as their flag ceremonies leave me bewildered and unimpressed.

We need to factor in everyone's identity in our politics and our messaging and our expectations and our goals and work to be done. Identity isn't going away, even if we solve some of the issues of non-inclusion and discrimination. There will be new ones, our contempt and rejection will evolve - we will always have class and distinctions, the kool kidz and the outcasts, to various degrees or on various topics. 

Probably our greatest failure and our greatest hope is that we built up, in Trump's favorite phrase, a "really beautiful" Big Tent this election, people from all walks - but it's still a Tower of Babel - we can occupy the same space, appreciate maybe the same music, but we still have trouble talking to each other, understanding each other, really clicking. But it's coming. We *are* the party of ideas, of inclusion, of trying the next step. We're a bit arrogant at times, but the message isn't to tear it all down and start over - it's to hone it, build over the rough spots, learn to see *past* our blind spots.

These white yokels over there and some Hispanics and a sprinkling of blacks aren't our enemy - they're our next challenge - you can't sell to or convince someone you despise or don't want to understand. And just like any physics theory or heuristic, ours needs to be adjusted to take into account different universes, different identities, different realities. Not to annihilate our own, but to make possible our building into another. The first underwater tunnel had to take into account the different nature of water flows and pressures and drainage and vents and other requirements for construction than was ever needed on land. But it wasn't a show-stopper, nor did the outcome look much different than a standard tunnel, the techniques & lessons learned differ that much from what went before. Identity's not bad - just different. Get used to it, understand it, work with it, move onward & upward.

PS - looks like Hillary vastly improved on Obama for the educated vote. Bad news is that, being America (the new 3rd world country), she greatly fell on the increasing uneducated vote. Low information voters? They're our future. Embrace Tiger, Return to Mountain.