Bernie Sanders’ Political Revolution
You mentioned your brother being more political…
He had a very strong influence in my intellectual development. He went to Brooklyn College, and he was active in the Young Democrats in Brooklyn College. So when he had to babysit me, he would drag me along, not happily, to meetings. My parents did not go to college. My father dropped out of high school. We didn’t have many books in the house. And my brother brought books into the house. He exposed me to not only politics but psychology and so forth. He would bring in books by Freud, novels, books on political science.
Are you observant?
No.
Do you believe in God?
Yeah, I do. I do. I’m not into organized religion. But I believe that what impacts you impacts me, that we are all united in one way or another. When children go hungry, I get impacted. When kids die because they can’t afford medicine, I get impacted. We are one world and one people. And that belief leads me to the conclusion that we just cannot turn our back on human suffering.
You’re so Brooklyn that it’s imprinted on your vocal cords. What kind of reinvention did it take to become a Vermonter?
When I was a kid growing up in Brooklyn, we lived in a lower-middle-class neighborhood in an apartment. I went to Boy Scout camp for three or four years. And going into the country was transformational for me. I remember on one occasion when I came back, I was crying, getting back into the city.
For whatever reason, very, very deep into me, I become a much more relaxed person being in the countryside in Vermont. I love it, ya know? If you leave Burlington and head out to the rural areas, like the Northeast Kingdom, my blood pressure goes down. Until this campaign, every year we used to do a pig roast in the town of Troy, Vermont. We’d have hundreds of people coming out. It is a spectacularly beautiful farm. I can picture it in my mind right now, the incredible beauty of the mountains near the Canadian border and just – people who I love very much. Vermont has obviously transformed my life.
People in Vermont are extraordinary people. If you stay in the state of Vermont, you don’t make a lot of money, in general. If you want to make money, you go to Boston or you go to New York City. So people who were born there, who stay there, they stay there because they’re attracted by both the physical beauty of the state and the human beauty of the state. And that makes a very, very good state.
Are there other ways that you unwind when you can’t get to Vermont? I mean, you are a high-strung guy.
[Shouting] What did you say?!
You got me [laughs].
The truth is, Washington is a very strange world. Before this campaign, I would always go home to Vermont on weekends. That’s where we did town meetings, that’s where I was with my family. And I would find when I would come back to Washington, I would suddenly feel myself a little bit depressed. It was the transition of coming from Vermont back to D.C.