Gary B. Anderson lives in Bath.

Determining the difference between simple and simplistic is often a complicated process. So is the issue of truthfulness, especially given our increasing confusion between real-world and online realities.

Graham Platner has nevertheless decided to enter politics, open-armed and fully armed with what I consider simplicity and veracity.

Though choosing to campaign from the blue side, his platform is fundamentally nonpartisan. “I’m just trying to give a damn about my community,” he has said. A community both blue and red and equally beleaguered by a failed two-party system that has abandoned the working poor and even the middle class. “Everybody knows that.”

Indeed, the average price for a single-family home in Maine is now well near half a million dollars. Individual health coverage is about $514 per month. Maine’s minimum hourly wage is $14.65, far short of an estimated $23.22 living wage.

Yet, Maine’s current median household net worth is reportedly $326,570 with a median income of $76,442. “Median” and “average” benefiting greatly because of Maine’s 615,235 households, as of 2020 there were 31,993 with millionaire status.

Maine has a lot of extremely well-off “haves,” but way more struggling “have-nots.” Though 73.8% of Mainers are homeowners and only 5% lack medical coverage altogether, affordability is the great divider that leaves most Mainers living paycheck to paycheck and seasonal job to seasonal job.

Oligarchy is another tricky issue. Franklin D. Roosevelt was totally part of the oligarchy of his day, yet remains the greatest champion of the working class and leveler of the economic playing field. FDR actually convinced his fellow ultra-rich to accept a tax rate of 94%.

Today, Bernie Sanders tirelessly works to reestablish that once just redistribution of wealth that enabled America to obtain world economic dominance.

Opening Sanders’ “Fighting Oligarchy” Labor Day rally in Portland, Platner, eloquently plain-spoken, took to task both sides of the aisle, in solidarity with grassroots and labor pushback against a political status quo that keeps pitting the majority of Americans against each other for the benefit of the few.

Sanders’ coast-to-coast tour clearly demonstrates the still unaddressed hunger of voters for truly fundamental political change. The DNC, however, continues to ignore that broad constituency’s embrace of Sanders’ simple and truthful call to make America far less inequitable again.

Here in Maine, Platner has started his own tour to unseat Sen. Susan Collins. His own uplifting truth-telling has already reinvigorated those like myself who had all but given up on a fresh, authentic candidate gambling on the power of actual democratic participation (rather than the power of an establishment war chest) and willing to put country, state and community before partisan fealty.

Platner is expounding a notion of populism that seeks empowerment via “we the people” unity rather than destructive divisiveness, emphasizing our basic commonality rather than partisan differences.

“We,” rather than “us vs. them.” Or, more truthfully, a united “us” from both sides of the political spectrum against a “them” whose extreme concentration of wealth chooses to undermine democracy itself.

Graham Platner chooses to be on the right side of politics. Not the left side, or straddling the middle, or the other side now believing that to make America great again is to return it to the rule of a king.

As he put it: “We do not live in a system that is broken — we live in a system that is functioning exactly as it’s intended, built by the political class to enrich and support billionaires on the backs of working people.”