To the Sanders supporter who thinks I wouldn't understand your impulse to vote for someone who speaks to your aspirations and hopes, well, consider that maybe we've done exactly what you propose to do, from a similar perspective, and saw what happened. 

Even young people can study history. It's why it was written. So we wouldn't have to keep learning the same lessons over and over.

However the older I get, the more I realize that there is nothing that can stop us from cycling around again. 

I campaigned for McGovern when I was a kid, and my first Presidential vote was for Jimmy Carter. They were good people. I think history has borne that out. But they were flawed candidates, and Carter was a President who achieved none of his promise, which btw, sounded an awful lot like what Sanders is promising. These guys hit brick walls. You can't wish the wall away. it's there whether you want to see it or not.

Obama would have been a more effective President if, on arriving in DC, he assumed the Republicans would be exactly as obstructionist as they said they'd be. I'm pretty sure the recovery would have been stronger if he had done so, and our health insurance would be better. Trying to work with the Republicans, clearly in hindsight, was a mistake.

I guess, like tech, politics is cyclic. Democrats are dreamers. I guess the Republicans are too. We share a country. About 50-50. And neither one wants to compromise. Not just the politicians, the voters too.