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.

You may have heard this story. I hadn't. Or at least not beyond the punch line, the cruelty part.

There was a man, a black man. He was angry a lot and one night when a friend couldn't afford $3 cover charge to get into a dance hall, he pulled out a gun and shot 3 people, I presume also black, but maybe not. One died. All over a $3 cover charge. He then drove away and stayed with different people for 3 days until his sister got him to agree to surrender to an old acquaintance, a cop. The cop was sitting in his mother's kitchen, said hi to him, and then turned back to speak to the mother, at which point the man fired 2 deadly shots into his neck and head.

He then walked outside, and fired a shot into his own head, leaving him partially lobotomized.

This year's election brought women's anatomy into play with some of the crudest language ever. We all remember that quote that kicked it all in:

"I don't vote with my vagina"

(or at least that's the one I remember).

But worse, the cat was out of the bag (or Pandora's "Box", so to speak) - women's privies are fair game for contemptuous political comments. A woman, Susan Sarandon, told us so. And she's a liberal political activist, a feminist, so it must be okay.

Just in case that wasn't clear enough, in endorsing Bernie she clarified "I don’t vote with my vagina…It’s so insulting to women to think that [we] would follow a candidate just because she’s a woman."

I think I read somewhere or came to the expectation that values would converge - maybe because of the speed of communication, our increased mobility, our common tongue...

I was wrong.

Society doesn't move backwards or forwards - it moves sideways like a crab. Buckminster Fuller used to hope for that day we could move directly towards our needs, but a man embedded in tetrahedrons and spin should have realized we're always in orbit orthogonal to something we're zipping past.