This week, on Netflix I watched the film Knock Down the House. The documentary mainly focused on Alexandria Cortez in 2018 running for congress in NYC and other women around the country also being a part of this movement of women running for congress. Honestly, I wasn’t expecting much and didn’t think I would learn a lot or be very interested on the subject of the movie. I remember well the election where Alexandria won and how exciting it was for NYC and thought that I knew a lot about this subject just from living through those times.

However, I was very surprised. What struck me is the lengths these women had to go through in order to even be on the ballot for the election. The establishment and big business are all buddy buddy with each other and make it so that anyone who truly is a working class, normal citizen has an extremely hard time running for any kind of office. The lack of support and the actually sabotage that goes into trying to make sure only white men are in the office is something I have known to be factual but watching a film where these women really sacrificed so much of their lives to try and run for congress and see how many walls were put up against them really made my blood boil.

Hearing about how much they thought about how they dressed and presented themselves so that people would like them just made me angry because that is something men don’t even consider.

Whether or not people agree with the politics of the women in the show, it’s a good subject to be talked about – the fact that people in power need to be shown that people can run for office and win without the backing from big companies and other politicians who want more people in their corner. The U.S.A has a long history of putting money over anything else and it shoes up in all of our systems. The hundreds of thousands of people that die every year because they don’t have health insurance is a good example. It’s been time that people start to align their politics with their morals rather than their pockets.