Graham Platner isn’t satisfied with the status quo. In fact, he’s downright pissed about it, and he’s not alone.

“…everyone in Maine, republican or democrat, Trump supporter or progressive, when you walk around this state, you ask any working person in the state, ‘Do you think that you live in a system, a political system, an economic system, that has your best interests at heart?’ Nobody says yes to that. Everyone says no. Because everybody knows, in their bones, they are being robbed and screwed. It is why we are angry.”

Susan Collins, United States Senator since 1997 (I was still in high school!), was born here in Caribou, Maine, to one of the oldest families in town. Their legacy goes back to the mid-nineteenth century during the settling of what was then called Lyndon. Along with being prominent local business owners for over 180 years, the Collins family has held offices in local, state, and national government for generations.

Graham Platner, a military veteran, Harbormaster, and oyster farmer from Sullivan, Maine, has exactly zero experience in partisan politics. He (like me) attended but did not finish college. Despite not being what the political elite (on both sides) might call “literate”, he is not afraid to pick up a dictionary and look up the meaning of the word “oligarchy” and recognize it as the underlying cause of the apparent siphoning of wealth from working class people over many decades.

As he begins his run for a position in the United States Senate in Maine, Graham is hosting a series of town hall meetings to speak directly to Mainers about his perspectives on the current state of affairs in partisan politics and what the path forward should look like.

Yesterday he delivered that message in Susan’s hometown of Caribou, Maine, where a surprisingly large number of people crowded into the small bingo hall of American Legion Post 15 to listen to the newest, gravelly voice in American politics.

“In 1990 there were fewer than 100 billionaires in the United States. Today there are over 800. When you look around, do you see a community that is eight times wealthier than in 1990? Do we make eight times as much money? Do we have eight times the hospitals, eight times the schools? Of course not. That money went somewhere, and we all know where it went.”

His message seemed pretty clear: Susan Collins’ feigned moderacy has served to leach power and wealth away from working class people in Maine to the benefit of people who already have wealth and power.

He also spoke about how Trump’s policies and tactics are not designed to help workers and families, but rather to further the ability of long-standing power structures to extract wealth from all Americans for the benefit of a few.

“…we need to be there with open arms to welcome back many of our neighbors who were lied to, who were taken in. When your neighbor’s house gets broken into, you don’t laugh at them afterwards. You don’t point fingers and say ‘you deserved it’. You go over there, you hug them and you help them. Many of our neighbors have been robbed.”

In his opinion, Maine deserves better than that, and he wants the opportunity to start organizing and rebuilding the communities needed to repair the damage done by years of self-serving politics to help Mainers get ahead.

In my opinion, Graham’s refreshingly positive and unifying message of needing to build back power structures for everyone by coming together across political ideologies needs to become normalized in everyday discourse.

No one person has all the answers or can do it alone, contrary to what Donald Trump would have you believe.