Hi there. Probably a few of you know something about me, but if you don’t, I’ve been posting at this site [refers to TOP] a long time, since 2005. Written a hell of a lot of diaries or stories or posts. You want to know my real name? Go to my profile page. It’s right there. Or read this post I wrote when I stopped being anonymous here at Daily Kos. You want to know the issues I care about? Here a few as shown by some prior posts:

War and War Crimes: US Army Admits Use of White Phosphorus as Weapon

Voter Suppression: Why I Woke Up to the Reality Of Stolen Elections

Race and Racism: What Do Conservatives Want When They Say "I Want My Country Back?"

Climate Change: The Megadrought is Coming: Climate Scientists Predict Decade Long Droughts For Much of America

Health Care Reform: Why the GOP's Plan to Kill Medicare Will Also Kill Me, My Family and You

Supporting More and Better Democrats: A True Story I Heard at My Aunt & Uncle's 50th Wedding Anniversary (& a lesson learned)

So yeah, I’m a well known quantity. And I’m old — I’m 59 though my 20 year old daughter mistakenly thought I was 69 on my last birthday. Gee thanks, dear.

Which brings me back to the subject of this post — why I support Bernie Sanders.

Well, when he first announced his candidacy I admit I was happy to see him enter the race, because I hoped he would pull Hillary Clinton more to the left. Other than that, I didn’t give him much of a thought. he was the ‘fringe’ candidate on the left. I was hoping Joe Biden might get in, to be honest so we could have a real debate on the issues, and because I thought he might prove to be a better candidate than Clinton. But that never happened, and so I resigned myself to having no choice in the matter.

You see, like almost everyone else back in early 2015, I was convinced she would be the nominee of the Democratic Party. She had all the support from other Democratic politicians. She’d been through the rigors of the 2008 campaign, and I assumed she would be better for having gone through that. She already had a ton of money backing her even before she announced. And she had Bill Clinton, former President and a man still beloved by many in the Democratic Party, as her biggest advocate and surrogate on the campaign trail.

But let me digress for a moment and tell you about my daughter, since she is the person most responsible, after all, for my change of heart.

She attends a top-flight college in Massachusetts studying to be a biomedical engineer. She's smart (Honor role every year so far). And she’s a good egg, to use an old-timey expression that people from the Dinosaur Generation (such as myself) like to use now and then. She believes in justice, equality and fairness for all people, even for those that so many in this country love to hate. What she cares about, she cares about deeply. At the age of six she became a vegetarian and stopped eating meat because I showed her an anti-veal ad of a baby calf in a crate. At the age of nine, she and I canvassed for John Kerry in west Cincinnati in some of the poorest slums I’ve seen, not only in America, but anywhere (and I’ve been to Jamaica and the Yucatan peninsula of Mexico). That was an eye-opening experience for both of us.

Here’s some more information about her:

She's half Japanese American and half German/Irish/Scotch/Welsh/French/Who knows what else American. The beauty and brain she got from her mother (I like to think I'm responsible for some of her other good qualities. I'm just not sure which ones).

She's in her own words "the straightest lesbian" in America (don't ask me what that means, I didn't say it).

She love cows, and I don't mean she loves to eat them. And she'll tell anyone who asks, and anyone who won't.

Her Grandmother survived the fire-bombing of Tokyo.

Her friends include artists, actors, writers, teachers, bullied kids, people with mental disorders, theater kids, jocks, goth kids, LGBT kids, kids who cut themselves, and (sadly) cute boys.

Others include fundamentalist Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus and (I know, how ghastly!) atheists.

She always smiles at everyone she meets.

She's a talented painter.

She is a talented pianist.

She aced her AP exams. And I mean the math, science, history - everything.

She did all this despite suffering from ADHD (no, it wasn't a misdiagnosis and she hates that people don't take her disorder seriously) and a moderately severe anxiety disorder, both of which were first diagnosed at the age of seven.

She loves her relatives who belong to the Tea Party even when they try to tell her everything she believes about justice and equality is wrong and that I brainwashed her into being a "liberal socialist Democrat" (as if she ever listened to anything I had to say!).

She's a fighter. Tough as nails. Doesn't take shit from anyone. Never backs down from a fight. Stands up for her beliefs no matter who challenges her. Terrified of the dark, sure, but the bravest person I know. A helluva lot braver than yours truly.

She believes the life of every human being has value and deserves society's support, especially after he or she is born.

She feels we should be judged by how we treat the most vulnerable in our country, not by how how many wars we fight, or millionaires we create at the expense of fairness and justice for all.

She cannot fathom why people want to hurt other people, but she'd like to find a way to make them stop.

She’s Po-Choice and a self declared feminist.

Most importantly , she helped save the mind and soul of her mother, a pancreatic cancer survivor who suffered brain damage from chemotherapy, and has been brought back from the brink of despair in no small part part because of the tireless efforts of my daughter, who was always there with a smile, a calm word, a gentle touch, a funny joke - whatever it took to make her beloved mother know that she was still needed, still loved, still had something to offer the world despite her cognitive disabilities. Without my daughter's maturity, support, love and kindness my wife might have been lost to us, not because of her cancer, but because she no longer felt she was worthwhile. My daughter taught her mother that she still has much to offer this world, and returned her to the love of her family, a debt I can never repay.

At her college she belongs to the only co-ed service fraternity, and made many friends among its members, even though the majority are devout conservative Christians and she is most definitely an atheist. She joined Alpha Phi Omega to help the local community through donating her time and raising money for groups such as Habitat for Humanity, Community Harvest Project, Mustard Seed Soup Kitchen, Wachusett Greenways, Audubon Society, Tower Hill Botanical Garden, and Relay for Life. And anyone who works to help others is okay in her book, even of they disagree about a lot of other stuff.

In short, she doesn’t just talk the talk, she walks the walk. I freely admit she’s a far better, far more moral person than I am.

So with that all that extended context out of the way, let me tall you the story of how she convinced me to support Bernie Sanders for President.

Last summer she didn’t come home after her sophomore year because she had a job working as a paid intern for one of her professors. Her hours were at all times of the day or night, so we didn’t talk much, but when we did she kept asking me about this guy Bernie Sanders. And I gave her my standard response, that he was a good man, but he didn’t stand a chance in hell of winning the nomination because Hillary was so well known, so well organized, and he was a person that few if any people had heard about, even though he’d been serving in Congress for decades. I told her Hillary was going to win the nomination. That was my honest opinion.

She said something along the lines of that seemed like a poor reason to not to check Bernie out and see if he might be a better candidate, someone more in line with my own values. Frankly, I was a little dismissive of her when she said that. I replied along the lines of ‘well that would be nice if we lived in a different world, one where money and name recognition and the political support of powerful people in the Democratic party didn’t matter so much to winning the nomination. But we don't.’ I could tell I was putting a damper on her natural desire to support people who share her values. But facts are facts, right?

But she kept asking me questions about Sanders. So I’d look up info for her, and email her what I found. And as I did that, I learned more about Mr. Sanders' record. And I began to check out Hillary Clinton’s record, too, because she would ask me stuff like “Didn’t Hillary support the Iraq War?” Or “I heard she worked for Walmart. Isn’t Walmart a really a bad company for workers? How could she do that?” And the more research I did, the more I kept finding out that I liked this Bernie Sanders guy. Yeah, maybe he had no shot to win the nomination, but he had integrity out the wazoo, and I agreed with him on most issues.

My daughter and I finally got to see each other that summer when we both attended my Aunt and Uncle’s 50th wedding anniversary in August last year. And it was very clear by then that she was more and more certain that Sanders was the right candidate, the only candidate she could support for the Democratic nomination. We talked about how many people she knew, both online and off, who supported him. We spoke about the large numbers of people, especially young people, that Bernie was drawing to his campaign events, crowds no one else came close to matching, not even the media’s darling reality TV show candidate, the ubiquitous Donald Trump. We talked about what was most important to us. Her core values and mine. She worked me over real good.

Still, I held out committing to his candidacy. He was still far behind in the polls, in name recognition, and in money (though that was starting to change). But we kept in touch even after she went back to school. And when we did talk on the phone, and the subject came around to the Democratic race, she kept talking about how important Sander’s campaign was to her. She hadn’t been old enough in 2012 to vote for Obama, and she told me she was so excited because her first vote would be voting for someone she truly believed in. Someone whose values and principles aligned with her own.

In October, my wife and I went back to Colorado to attend our 30th year Law School reunion. My daughter joined us after it was over, because she had a break and wanted to bring her boyfriend out to meet her relatives. At some point, she got into a heated argument with my younger brother about Bernie Sanders. He's an independent that leans to the right, mostly, and to be honest he was egging her on a little, teasing her really, but she was dead serious.

I was just watching their exchange, because between the two of them there was no way I was going to get a word in anyway, when out of the blue, she asked me (or maybe I should call it a statement to be fair), “Dad you support Bernie, right? Tell Uncle ______ why he’s wrong about [now here I can’t really recall the precise issue they were debating, but it had something to do with Sanders being a socialist and how socialism is bad, and blah, blah, blah]. Tell him, Daddy,” she said. “You know.”

And that’s when it hit me. I did know. I was a Bernie supporter.

I’d done all the research on the differences between Hillary and Bernie on the issues, their respective records and their relative strengths and weaknesses as candidates. I could no longer stand on the sideline. I could no longer just assume that Hillary would be the nominee, and use that as an excuse not to commit to Bernie, a person who I actually liked and respected as a human being, much less a politician. I just needed that nudge (i.e., sharp poke with a stick) from my daughter. So I told my brother why he was wrong about Bernie. And I’ve been telling people ever since why they should support him, whether they are Democrats, Republicans or those unaffiliated with either party (a better term than independent in my opinion for such folks).

So thanks, Punkin Poo (sorry, but that’s been my nickname for her since she was two), I needed that.

(Cross-posted at TOP)