By John P. Gregg
Political Editor

No, not Hillary Clinton's. These broken dreams are found in many of the 1,800 e-mails U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., has received from Americans, most of them Vermonters, struggling mightily with heating bills, rising gas prices and other expenses.

Sanders, who solicited the comments from his list of e-mail contacts, has compiled some of them in a 15-page booklet, The Collapse of the Middle Class: Letters from Vermont and America, that he has mailed to Vermont media outlets. He read some of them on the Senate floor, and the booklet is also available on his Senate Web site, www.sanders.senate.gov.

They are worth a read, especially as the oil market lurches toward what threatens to be an even more brutal season in terms of heating costs. The letters are printed without identifying the writers by name, but their stories are haunting.

"By February we ran out of wood and I burned my mother's dining room furniture," wrote a single-mother of a 9-year-old boy who lives in a small city in Vermont. "I have no oil for hot water. We boil our water on the stove and pour it in the tub."

A retired Vermont couple in their mid-60s, who had to retire early because of a work injury and a plant closing, also told their story.

"Now with oil prices the way they are we cannot afford to heat our home unless my husband cuts and splits wood, which is a real hardship as he has had his back fused and should not be working most of the day to keep up with the wood," the wife wrote. "We also only eat two meals a day to conserve."

And a man who lives in a small town near the New Hampshire border wrote in to say this: "This winter, after keeping the heat just high enough to keep my pipes from bursting (the bedrooms are not heated and never got above 30 degrees), I began selling off my woodworking tools, snowblower (pennies on the dollar) and furniture that had been handed down in my family from the early 1800s, just to keep the heat on … Today I am sad, broken and very discouraged."

Over the years, Sanders has railed about wealthy and institutional forces conspiring to benefit themselves and, in the process, sticking it to the little guy. It's an indictment so often repeated that it's easy to tune out.

Reading these letters, the thought occurs that maybe more people should listen to him.