Graham Platner

I could not figure out what the immense amount of violence I partook in, what that did for the town of Sullivan, Maine.

And to this day, no one's ever been able to explain to me.

I do know that some people made a lot of money off the wars that I fought in, and it wasn't the young men and women who did the fighting, and it certainly wasn't the civilians that we inflicted just wild amounts of violence upon.

It's defense contractors, and it's folks in political power.

So I became very critical of American foreign policy.

Which as I, then that kind of just set me on a road of being, well, if I'm critical of foreign policy, why is our foreign policy like this?

So I became more critical of our political structures.

And once you start being critical of the political structure, you're like, well, why is our political structure like this?

And that takes you into like an economic critique.

And you start to realize that, oh, I like this whole system in many ways does seem to be built by people in power with wealth to maintain or expand their wealth and power generally to the

to the immiseration or diminishment of regular working folks.

And I think the reason this campaign has sort of blown up the way it has is I think a lot of people are getting wise to this.

I think a lot of folks are like, wait a second, this stuff that we all thought for years,

We are getting a totally different outcome from what we claim we're trying to do.

So are we actually trying to do the thing that we claim or is all of this doing something else?

And when you reframe the question of like, does all of this exist just to like screw working people and make somebody else rich?

Suddenly a lot of decisions we make begins to become a lot more clear.

And so that's kind of where I've, it's been a long journey.

I mean, it's definitely not been, I didn't like have a day where I'm like, oh, I figured it out, but.

I forget what year this was, but I read a book called No Shortcuts by Jane McAlevey.