Dear Young Voters, Sincerely, Gen X
Dear Young Voters,
I know you’re disillusioned. I know you’re unhappy with the political process, I feel, in my older-ing bones, your lack of enthusiasm for the last man standing.
I get it.
I was part of the generation which came of age at the height of the AIDS/HIV crisis. We were still living under a thinly veiled threat of nuclear fallout, terrified by The Day After and Chernobyl. The Berlin Wall was still standing. Nancy Regan was consulting her astrologist and pleading with us to “JUST SAY NO!” to drugs.
1988 was the first year I was eligible to vote. My choices for president? George H.W. Bush and Michael Dukakis. I can already hear you asking, Michael Who-what-is?? I wasn’t very excited either. Neither was the rest of the country.
Bush won handily. Back then instead of e-mail scandals it was the racist trope of Willie Horton. It was Kitty Dukakis necking bottles of vanilla extract in the closet.
The truth of it was that Dukakis wasn’t all that exciting. But would he have been immeasurably better, in all his boring moderation, than Bush I?
Considering that we should be able to easily connect the dots between Reagan and the not-so-fabulous Bushes, the answer is a resounding yes.
When Bush won, I was terrified, convinced the whole country was going to hell. I worried the draft would be reinstated, I worried my male friends would be shipped off to the Middle East to fight a war none of us believed in.
So many of us were disgusted with the government. We protested the war. I got on a bus at 5 am to travel down to DC to march with hundreds of thousands of others for reproductive rights. In NYC we marched to take back the night.
It didn’t do any good. No one was listening. And so we started to distrust the system. The same way the flower children started to distrust the system during Vietnam. The same many do now.
I get it.
For all our quaint John Hughes movies and bad hairstyles, all our electro-pop music and James Spader rich boy sneering, thirty years ago, most of us were you: faced with political choices that fell flat. Trust me. It was really hard get excited about Dukakis.
But…a lot gets lost in translation. Gen X wasn’t all Duran Duran and parachute pants and Reality Bites ennui. There was momentum. There were movements. LGBTQ rights were on the horizon, women in shoulder pads were, if not busting into boardrooms, then knocking at the door. There was fire and crackle and sizzle. Rage at the fuddy-duddy process. Demands for faster progress.
So what happened? In the most boring predictable of clichés, a lot of us grew up. The economy boomed. We fell in love. Got jobs. September 11 came along and upended the way we viewed the world. Kids were born, parents died. We got divorced, remarried. Lost jobs. Battled cancer. Life.
Life happened. And on that spectrum of life you realize things aren’t always as cut and dry as they seem. You see that progress more often than not means making deals with the devil.
It sucks.
That doesn’t make it any less true.
I feel the fire in your belly. I understand that sense of helplessness. I feel the frustration that no one is listening to your spot-on, legitimate demands to move the country forward. The now or never, the urgency, the binary. It might feel new and shiny, but it’s not. Pundits and academics, the folks who write articles and sway opinions? I think they forget what it’s like to be in that 18–25 year-old age bracket.
Don’t lose sight of the march forward. Push for it. Push for it to happen faster. Be that damn beacon.
But not at the expense of a slower moving progression.
What may seem boring and moderate now was responsible for ushering in an era where it is not only easier for LGBTQ youth to come out, but one which supports them, both socially and legally. Don’t think that’s big deal? Go check out those John Hughes movies Generation X are so fond of. There aren’t any gay characters in them. That is a seismic cultural shift. We showed the country there was room in The Breakfast Club for the “gay one” as well.
We did that.
In 1991 I sat in stunned silence as Anita Hill accused Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment. And then watched as Congress approved him for the Supreme Court of the United States anyway. In 1991, there were two women in the Senate.
Two.
The so-called “Year of the Woman” followed, where more women than ever before ran and won for Congress.
We did that.
You get older and you live longer and you realize, quite clearly, there are terrible things out there in the world. As a young adult there is love. There is war. There is right. There is wrong. There are clear lines in the sand. And that is as it should be. You need that clarity, that focus. If at eighteen you realized how many different ways you could be truly fucked, you’d never get out of bed. We’d lose an entire generation.
You may look at us, slightly pudgy and graying, comfortable shoes reminiscing about our youth and think the fire’s gone out of our bellies. But the thing about fire is that if you can’t control it, it burns the whole place down, the good with the bad. The trick is learning how to tame the flames enough to make them useful, how to use them in your favor.
I guess what I’m really saying is don’t give up. You have the elasticity to bounce back. We may be living life with our slightly less radical and slightly more centrist ideas, with our boring policy talk, doing things the only way we know how. But you? You have the opportunity to live the lives never offered us. Use that gift to tame the flames in a way to make them work for you.
I know you won’t listen. I know because I wouldn’t have when I was eighteen, nineteen. I would have looked at the middle-aged person trying to give me advice as a relic of the past. A pudgy fossil on their way to Shady Pines.
I’ll say it anyway. Don’t throw a bucket of cold water on your fire because it’s not burning in the direction you hoped.
So sure, we may seem stodgy and middle-aged now. It may look like we sold out, became complacent, gave up. But really we’re just getting ready to pass the baton.
It’s up to you to run with it. Don’t sit down on the track before you even start.
Sincerely,
Gen X
