Who Goes to Hell, Madeleine Albright?

Am I angry? You bet I am! I feel like saying, "Go to hell yourself, Madeleine Albright and take Gloria Steinem with you!"

How dare these figures of yesterday tell me whom to vote for! How dare they say women will go to hell if they don't support Hillary Clinton. How dare they insult my granddaughters by snickering that  heartfelt, reasoned support of Bernie Sanders is actually based on "going where the boys are".

Before there was a Gloria Steinem prancing around as a Playboy Bunny to get a magazine story, when Madeline Albright was still in her teens, I was out there all on my own, pushing for women's equality. In 1957, a few days before turning twenty-one, I confronted the publisher of the New York Times, Arthur Hayes Sulzberger, and asked him, "Where are your women reporters?" That moment, and my struggle thereafter as a woman in "a man's world", is recounted in my article for the online zine "The Blazing World" at The Biggest News Story in History.

So—no!—neither Steinem nor Albright has the right to question the way I vote. I am older than either and have earned my battle ribbons. In fact, nobody tells me what to do!

Indeed, nobody has the right to say such outrageous things about the voting choices of any of us. This is America!

We women struggled to have the right to choose in all aspects of our lives. One of these rights is the right to choose whom we vote for. As late as the 1960s and early 1970s women were repeatedly telling us precinct walkers, "I always vote the way my husband tells me to." We women threw off that manacle, and none of us are now going to take orders from has-beens like Steinem and Albright.

Beyond the arrogance of these two is their blindness. How can they believe that young women are so "boy-crazy" as to be in the Bernie Sanders camp to pick up guys? Do they even know any young women? Seems to me they are judging today's young women by what their own generation was like in its young years so very, very long ago.

If they don't know any young people—and lots of older people don't—they are missing something wonderful. The so-called millenials are just great! Smart, steady, caring about others and the environment, they are a treat to know.

The young people have a really solid reason for supporting Bernie Sanders. He cares about them. He knows they are the first generation to enter maturity loaded with debt, unable to marry and start families, unable to dream of buying a home.  He knows that they can't find full-time steady jobs with decent salaries. He knows they fear mightily that global warming is destroying the world and their hope of any future at all.

Hillary Clinton and her friends are lost in the mists of yesterday.  They are blowing a trumpet for a women's movement that has already overrun their entrenchment and moved on beyond them. The three are callously uninformed about the actual plight of young women and young men.

Hillary Clinton is out of it in other big ways. She is astonishingly uninformed about the death-dealing threat of climate change, scoffing at Bernie Sanders for saying it's a greater threat than ISIS. Indeed, Hillary thinks even Russia—pathetically teetering on economic collapse because of oil's plunging price— is a bigger worry than the looming death of our planet.

She's stuck back in the Cold War era along with the hawk-of-all-time Henry Kissinger, whom she strangely speaks of now with awe. Why does she admire him? He managed with Nixon to extend the Vietnam War for seven years after Nixon was elected in 1968 falsely touting a "secret plan" to end that fiasco.

Richard Nixon, Henry The Hawk, Vietnam. And of course, Iraq.

Hillary has seen a lot of history, but as her vote to invade Iraq showed, she doesn't ever learn. Is it because she thinks she knows it all already? Whatever the reason, she doesn't look or listen. That's why she doesn't know the young and what they see today that understandably frightens them.

We are a fortunate nation to have such young people, so caring and well-educated. They deserve better than an out-of-touch Hillary Clinton who will lead us back into the mistakes of another era, oblivious to the real troubles of today and the real needs of those who will make all the tomorrows.

Let the past bury the past and stop being bossy, Hillary, Gloria, and Madeleine. The world belongs to younger people because they will be here long after we are gone.

It's their turn.