The following essay was submitted by Kyle Gonzalez, a New Haven resident, community organizer, and member of the Neighborhood Leadership Program. The first time I heard Wildaliz Bermúdez speak, she was in Fair Haven speaking to a crowd of supporters. I made sure to pay close attention to the wa y that the candidate carried herself alongside the politics that she discussed. During her closing remarks, her daughter ran up to Bermúdez with urgency — an urgency that mirrors the urgency we carry as a community. She whispered something into her mother’s ear. Wildaliz listened, smiled, and shared it with the crowd: “Possibilitarians. We need to be possibilitarians.” From the mouth of a child to the heart of our community, these words embody what it means to work toward your reality. To be a possibilitarian is about community-centric agency. It means rejecting the institutional cynicism that tells working-class neighborhoods — from Fair Haven and the Heights to the Annex and Morris Cove — to lower their expectations and accept whatever crumbs the state hands down. It is the belief that our neighborhoods are not empty slates waiting for Hartford bureaucrats to fix them; we already hold the resilience, talent, and lived wisdom to build our own solutions. Then, during the recent candidate forum, when asked about his career as an Assistant Attorney General where he defended the Connecticut Department of Correction against wrongful death and civil rights lawsuits, Leland Moore brushed off the critique and called it an unfair assumption. He hid behind the shield of constitutional obligation and offered the familiar institutional defense: “We shouldn’t make assumptions about where we are based on the work that we do.” I refuse to accept that logic. In public office, the work you choose to do is your values in practice. When a leader’s default instinct is to defend state power at all costs, it exposes a troubling flaw in how they view human beings under state authority. Look at what that legal defense looks like in the real world. In court filings representing the state, Moore argued that a 27-year-old man who suffered a fatal overdose in a state-monitored halfway house was simply “responsible for his own death.” That argument should give pause to anyone who believes in basic human dignity. When an individual is in a state facility or a halfway house, they are a ward of the state. The state controls where they sleep, what they eat, and what care they receive. In return, the state owes them an absolute duty of care. Connecticut spends millions of taxpayer dollars on DOC addiction services and counselors precisely because we acknowledge that duty. To stand up in a courtroom and argue that a human life under state control is on its own — that the state carries no responsibility for its negligence — is not just a legal posture. It is a moral abdication. This mindset matters deeply because the people locked away in state custody do not stay there forever. The vast majority of incarcerated individuals return home — to FairHaven, the Annex, and neighborhoods across New Haven. They become our neighbors, our workers, and our families. How can we trust a leader to represent our community with humanity when they have spent years using legal technicalities to excuse state negligence against those very same neighbors? This is the fundamental split in the 97th District race. On one side is an institutional insider whose career is built on insulating state power from accountability. On the other side is Wildaliz Bermúdez — a leader whose life, from her childhood as a plaintiff in the Sheff v. O’Neill desegregation lawsuit to her leadership on the Fair Rent Commission,has been defined by holding state power accountable to regular people. As Bermúdez made clear in direct response to Moore: “The work that we do becomes who we are.” On Aug. 11, we have a choice. We can elect someone who defends the system’s failures, or we can elect a candidate who walks into Hartford with the vision of a possibilitarian — someone who knows our community has the power to demand, build, and achieve a better reality for ourselves. The post Opinion: The Politics Of Possibility — Why The 97th District Needs Wildaliz Bermúdez appeared first on New Haven Independent. ...read more read less