The fight for the Democratic Nomination is over! Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has defeated Senator Bernie Sanders, and can now shift all of her attention to her general election opponent, Republican nominee Donald Trump! At least that is what the national media has been saying, loudly, for months now. If the media is correct, then I suppose it means that Bernie is engaged in a lavish performance art piece for the glorification of his own ego, and his supporters are being played for fools or are in on the joke. Even as I write this, thousands of Bernie supporters are pounding pavement, knocking on doors, and calling people all across the state of California in a supposedly doomed, comic attempt to win the state’s Primary this Tuesday, June 7th. But there is at least one person who is certainly not laughing about Bernie’s chances this Tuesday: Secretary Clinton herself! Hillary has been crisscrossing the state for the last several days in a last effort to win a state that is slipping from her once firm grasp. Hillary Clinton is here fighting for votes because she knows that no election is ever over until California has had its say.

California is by far the most populous state in the United States of America, and is estimated to be home to over 39 million human beings (Texas is second with just shy of 27.5 million, while the nation itself is home to an estimated 323 million people, making it the third most populous on earth). To try to put California’s size in perspective, if it were its own nation, it would rank as the 35th largest on the planet, and home to more people than Canada. If California were an independent nation, it would have the 6th or 7th largest economy in the world according to Gross Domestic Product, having a larger economy than India and is either just behind, or actually ahead of (according to different sources) France, a nation inhabited by over 20 million more people than California. And yet, in spite of our wealth, power, and population, national politics and national politicians often ignore us (the Republican approach), or take us for granted (The Democratic approach). Californians are tired of being marginalized in national affairs. Bernie’s popularity and his chance to win the Golden State are in part because he’s taken the all-too-rare step of actually listening to what we have to say.

Bernie has not promised to fix everything overnight or by himself. Instead he has reminded us of the power that we have as a people to make our state, our nation, and our world a better place. Failing to use our power has allowed money in politics to clog and calcify the arteries of democracy. Bernie, like a surgeon, is asking for our help in performing a bypass surgery by way of political revolution. If we continue to tolerate the accumulation of wealth and power in the hands of only a small group of wealthy oligarchs, then eventually the patient, “the American democracy,” will die.

There is no way that our nation can remain a democracy when the people of California are solely addressed by national leaders when our Primary comes up, only to return to being politically irrelevant again the day afterwards. Treating 39+ million people as an afterthought is a dangerous way to run things. And as if ignoring us politically for all but a few weeks every four years was not insulting enough, the national media is now telling us that our votes are meaningless because the race is already over. Really? Must they rob us of what limited voice we already have?

Bernie is here, and so is Hillary, but only one of them is saying that things cannot stand as they currently are, where the nation and much of the world looks to us for technology, entertainment, diversity, science, music, and food (among other things), but turns away from us when we try to have a say in larger issues. But Bernie hears us, and the national media is going to have to sell its ‘California doesn’t matter’ story elsewhere, because on Tuesday we’re going to speak up together, and the whole world will have no choice but to listen.