​Walk about wonder

By Ed Raymond

Bernie Sanders is on the world’s longest and oldest walkabout

Adolescent Australian Aboriginal males often volunteer to challenge the transition to adulthood by performing well (that means staying alive) in a six-month trial in the Australian outback called the walkabout, complete with spear, jug, knife, boomerang and courage. The purpose of the walkabout is a coming of age ceremony, turning a boy into a man who can be relied upon to find food, water and shelter.

About 20 years ago, I wrote a column about the first Australian expedition to cross the 4,000-mile Australian southern outback from east to west to survey, map and study what is there. The Australians had vehicles and about 20 tons of survival supplies for the dangerous crossing. Before starting out, expedition members spotted one Aboriginal man equipped with the usual tools hanging about their camp. When asked what he was doing there, he said, “I’m going with you.”

He walked the entire distance, helping them find water and some food by watching what the clouds did. He also provided some spiritual songs describing his culture. Whenever Indigenous Australians left jobs at cattle stations and horse ranches to return to their traditional life, they said just two words: “Go walkabout.” Evidently, they thought this told the whole story.

Bernie Sanders will be on walkabout, telling truths until he dies

Bernie Sanders is the most unusual politician in the Divided States of America. He is a Jewish atheist who always tells the truth in his battles with King Donald, who always tells lies. I became a Bernie fan when ten Democrats were running for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016. Among that group I rated Joe Biden Number 10 and Bernie Number 1. They are the same age, but Joe Biden exhibited an old brain and Bernie seduced the young Gen Z with a taut young brain that always came up with the truth.

The March 12, 2026 New York Review of Books contained a review by Thomas Powers titled “A Real Live Socialist.” The review analyzed Dan Chiasson’s book “Bernie for Burlington: The Rise of the People’s Politician and the Transformation of One America Place.” The term “walkabout” leaped out at me as soon as I started to read this article about Bernie’s life at home and on the political gravel, asphalt and concrete roads.

His religion — and lack of it — immediately reminded me of the Holocaust survivor at Auschwitz who was asked by a reporter whether he believed in God. His response? “It depends on whether he can tell me why he allowed Adolph Hitler and his SS-Gestapo Nazis to kill six million of my brothers and sisters.”

Bernie’s walkabout in politics started in 1941 when he was born to a Jewish father and mother in a poor section of Brooklyn in New York City. He walked about two blocks away to James Madison High School and graduated in 1959. Then he walked about a mile and a half and spent a year at Brooklyn College, where he read Albert Einstein’s famous essay “Why Socialism?” published in 1949 when Bernie was eight years old. Bernie believed every word, because Einstein was one of the smartest Jewish men in the world who had escaped the Holocaust. Bernie immediately joined the Eugene V. Debs Club to meet other New York Socialists.

I watched the Lyin’ King’s State of the Union speech of one hour, 47 minutes (the longest in history). A six-year-old expression by Trump-hater-Republican Rick Wilson is perfect for my response: “We’ve gone from the best and brightest to the dumb and dangerous!”

The American people allow this nutcase to sit in the unpadded Oval Office, which is decorated like a cheap thrift store where he can reach the nuclear button. If you need to know what a nutcase is, the following words and terms from dictionaries, encyclopedias and the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) will help you: convicted felon, sexual predator, jerk, prick, asshole, malignant narcissist, socio-psychopath — and his latest, war criminal, murdering people on the high seas. Trump does not miss a characteristic of these bullies, liars, misfits and criminals.

Why did Albert Einstein choose a Socialistic economy?

After watching Hitler’s capitalistic dictatorship blow up the world during World War II, Einstein argued in his essay that “capitalism’s economic anarchy is the source of severe societal evils, including immense wealth inequality, predatory competition, and the subjugation of individuals to profit. The well-being of all in society depends upon a planned economy combined with a democratic socially-oriented education system. A social economy will use the means of production owned by society.”

“This means it will produce for the needs of society rather than the glorification of power and success,” the essay continues. “A country must have a strong, democratic, and transparent system to prevent bureaucracy from becoming all powerful. All education must be directed to foster social responsibility. Private capitalism tends to become concentrated in few hands, leading to an oligarchy that influences political parties and the media. Capitalist competition creates unnecessary booms and busts, wasting labor and limiting individual development.”

Then disaster struck Bernie’s family. His mother died of serious heart problems in March 1960, and his father died of the same in 1962 when Bernie was only 21. After absorbing every word of Einstein’s essay, Bernie abruptly quit the little Brooklyn College and walked about to the Midwest and enrolled at the University of Chicago.

Bernie has never said much about his selection of university, but I believe he had searched for one he would enjoy. During the 1960s, the University of Chicago had earned a reputation of being an intensely academic, rigorous (and conservative) university with a contrarian attitude. The faculty was also known for its pioneering, top-tier research. And it had a few interesting quirks which Bernie would like. It had a satirical student organization called the “Students for Violent Non-Action (SVNA).” I think Bernie picked the University of Chicago because it had quit big-time Big Ten football in 1939 after it had been beaten 85-0 by the University of Michigan. University President Robert Maynard Hutchins had made big news in the country when he decided that major college football “was incompatible with academic values.” Chicago pulled out of the Big Ten Conference in 1946 and dropped all Division 1 athletic programs. Football was finally restored in 1969, but only at Division III NCAA level where it is today.

It’s interesting that Bernie is a pretty good athlete in his eighties. In high school, he was captain of the track team, lettered in cross-country and ran a fourminute, 37 second mile in high school. That’s pretty damn good. He has enjoyed basketball all his life and is still considered to be a terrific mid-range shooter. He also plays a lot of softball and pitched softball at the Iowa “Field of Dreams” in 2019 when he was 78. I know he would be opposed to the NCAA transfer portal program in all athletics because he prefers the way that European universities stay out of sports. As a walk-on walkabout of Burlington, Vermont, he supported minor league baseball because it wasn’t a big deal.

How Did a Bronx Jew become four-term mayor of Burlington, Vermont?

He worked hard to get his first real job. He always told the truth. He never bragged about himself. He always asked questions and always insisted on getting answers. He always ducked questions about himself because he wasn’t interested in himself. He always wanted to move on.

Bernie was recently asked by the Service Employees International Union-Healthcare Workers West (SEIU-UHW) to discuss a proposed tax on the wealthiest Californians. He quickly walked about and filled a huge Los Angeles theater because he is known worldwide as the Pied Piper of the young. Bernie enjoyed the raucous crowd which he aroused with these statements:

The nation’s ruling class, the billionaires, is greedy, arrogant, and is guilty of moral turpitude. Never before have so few people had so much wealth and so much power. It is fairly disgusting!

The top one percent act as the oligarchs and monarchs of past centuries. The U.S. billionaire elite no longer sees itself as part of American society. These guys literally believe that they have the divine right to rule and are no longer subject to democratic governance.

California residents worth more than $1 billion would pay a 5% tax on their assets to offset looming federal cuts to health care and support public education and state food assistance programs. California is home to more billionaires than any other state and the tax would apply to about 200 residents.

California resident Larry Ellision owns several private jets. Mark Zuckerberg has yachts and several very expensive homes. For these people, enough is never enough. They are dedicated to accumulating more and more wealth and power, and they do that no matter what harm they bring to human families. The billionaire class cannot have it all. The nation belongs to all of us. Approving a wealth tax would send a clear and profound message that enough is enough.

Before introducing Sanders, Suzanne Jimenez, the chief of staff of the union, warmed up the young audience: “Billionaires must pay their fair share. If we don’t act, our friends and our family will have to drive twice as far,will have to wait twice as long, for the life-saving care that they are going to need. And for what? So that billionaires can own another yacht?”

How does Bernie survive as the only Socialist in Congress?

It must be because he always tells the truth. When he graduated from the University of Chicago in 1964, he became immediately eligible for the military draft. He didn’t have bone spurs. He walked about to Vermont because he didn’t want to walk about to Vietnam and fight a war.

Bernie was — and still is — not very religious. In fact, he is close to being an atheist. But he claimed to be a conscientious objector to escape the war. He defended himself for two years and his claim was finally rejected on September 8, 1967 — the day he turned 26 and was no longer eligible for the draft. Maybe a Jewish God was looking after him all that time!

From his walk about being mayor of Burlington and other jobs in Vermont, he walked about and was elected to the federal house in 1991, served there for 16 years and then walked about and was elected to the Senate in 2007. His present term ends in 2030. He has been chairman of many important committees and has run for the Democratic presidential nomination twice.

In the 2016 election, more than 90 million eligible voters, mostly young, did not vote in the Trump-Clinton race. I’m convinced if Bernie had been the candidate in 2016, he would have spirited millions of those young voters to vote for a Democratic Socialist who is still walking about to find the common good.

Reach The Gadfly at fargogadfly@gmail.com.