"NOTHING CAN BE CHANGED UNTIL IT IS FACED"

It's an honor to grab the mic

I’ve been in New Hampshire this week, and this video is a talk I gave at Keene State College on Sunday.

Running for political office is a grinding experience. But it’s also exhilarating, because it’s a chance to speak about the possibilities of breakthrough at a time when people are so tempted to surrender to the thought that things can never change.

As someone who remembers a time when there was a thriving middle class in this country, and certainly more hope filled the air than does now, I’m so sad for young people who can hardly believe such a time existed.

When I read the other day that 39% of Americans - 44% of millennials - report they regularly skip meals in order to pay their rent, I literally gasped.

When I think of twenty-somethings carrying literally tens of thousands of dollars in college loan debt because they thought that if they got an education it would set them up for a better life, I feel infuriated. I can’t imagine how I would have been able to psychologically carry such a burden at that age.

And when I think of the 18 million Americans who can’t afford to fill the prescriptions their doctors give them while the top five pharmaceutical companies amassed a profit of over 80 billion dollars last year alone, it deepens my commitment to offer the American people an alternative to accepting any of those statistics as simply the way things have to be.

To those of you who are supporting my campaign, I cannot thank you enough. Please keep doing what you can to help me provide the American people with the possibility of a better way. The idea that only those whose careers are entrenched within the system that drove us into this ditch should be considered qualified to drive us out of it, seems absurd to me. My qualification is not that I can help perpetuate that system; my qualification is that I can help disrupt it.

With this campaign, we’re already starting to do that.

We’re saying things that all of us know to be true, but that somehow there’s like a conspiracy of silence not to discuss in public. Throughout my career I’ve had people say to me, “You talk about things that all of us talk about, but you talk about them when the mic is on.” I’ll take that. We need desperately to begin deeper, more authentic, more honest conversations within the space of our political discourse.

Martin Luther King, Jr. said our lives begin to end on the day we stop talking about things that matter. I hope you feel that with this campaign I’m talking about things that matter. I can promise you, my team and I are trying.

Please sign up for the campaign at marianne2024.com, check out our events, volunteer if you can, and help spread the word. There’s a serious effort on the part of the political/media establishment to pretend that I don’t exist, that I’m not serious, and all the things they’d like people to believe so people won’t hear the message of the campaign. I’ve grown a tough enough skin to take the personal insult, but I need support in breaking through the wall of institutional resistance to a woman who comes from outside the club and dares to say that there’s truly something wrong in there.

Even just saying that is its own kind of fun. Truth itself has an ameliorative effect. In the words of James Baldwin, “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” My campaign is bringing up some difficult truths, because only when we face them will we be able to change them.

I feel honored and grateful to have this chance to grab the mic.