Save Us, Millennials
By Timothy Egan
When an electorate is
red-faced and
fist-clenched, when the
collective national
blood pressure
is 160 over 100, when
the big issues of the
day are mired in tired
minds, it’s time to turn
to the great, renewable
resource of any vibrant
democracy: the kids.
The Millennials, that
echo boomer generation
born after 1982, have
not been heard from of
late, ever since proving
that they could pull
away from their
Facebook pages
long enough to help
elect a president.
The young were
Barack Obama’s
strongest supporters,
and still are, though
there’s been some
slippage. They were wise
beyond their years and
ahead of every other
generation on the major
issues — from offshore
oil
drilling (not so fast),
to gays in the military
(duh), to tolerance of
the new American ethnic
stew (you mean that’s
still a problem?).
But having done their
part for history, and
now facing a job market
that is forcing many of
them to become
reacquainted with their
childhood bedrooms, the
generation born to all
those baby boomers has
become somewhat
invisible.
We’ve been led to
believe that the grumpy,
the cranky and the
bitter will drive the
midterm elections in the
fall. You would never
know, with nightly
images of jowly Tea
Partiers and their
inchoate discontents,
that people ages 18 to
29 years old made up a
larger percentage of the
2008 electorate than
those over 65.
Because they gave their
hearts to Obama, by an
overwhelming margin, the
young have a proprietary
interest in this
president. And now, at
Obama’s moment of peril,
when people who are
losing their heads want
him to lose his, we need
the cooler minds of a
generation that grew up
with endless wars and
color-coded terrorist
alerts.
If anyone should be
complaining about
deficits, it should be
the 20-somethings who
will have to pay for all
those meds-popping
boomers moving into the
comfort of
Medicare
and
Social Security.
If anyone should be
upset over two long wars
that were put on the
credit card, it should
be the generation
shedding the most blood
in those conflicts.
And if anyone should
take personally the
poisoning of a vast
ecosystem in the Gulf of
Mexico, it should be the
one cohort of the
electorate that showed
the most skepticism of
oil companies and the
strongest desire for a
new green economy.
Instead, at a time when
most Americans described
themselves as “angry,”
the generation now
entering adulthood is
keeping their trademark
optimism. A recent,
detailed survey of their
attitudes done by the
Pew Research Center
was headlined: “The
Millennials: Confident.
Connected. Open to
Change.”
Those are precisely the
character traits needed
for this age, and all
the more reason why
Obama should engage
these voters for the
upcoming election.
For starters, consider
what it would be like to
have
Mitch McConnell,
the dyspeptic Republican
from
Kentucky
who emerges from his
turtle shell every two
weeks to say no, as the
next Senate majority
leader. Or
John Boehner,
who called expansion of
health care for 32
million Americans
“Armageddon”— running
the House.
Let Boehner take away
from millions of
fresh-minted adults the
provision in the new law
that allows dependent
children to stay on
their parents’
health insurance
until age 26.
Or look at the exhausted
fight over gays in the
military. More than any
other generation,
Millennials see this as
a nonissue. But a week
ago Senator
John McCain
threatened a
filibuster
to keep gay men and
lesbians from being able
to openly serve their
country in uniform. He
is a man of his age.
Can we just press the
fast-forward button a
decade or so into the
future, or have McCain
debate his eminently
more sensible daughter,
Meghan?
Nor are the Millennials
afraid of
immigration
— in part because it’s a
family issue. Nearly one
in four Americans under
the age of 18 have at
least one immigrant
parent, according to a
recent national portrait
put out by the
Brookings Institution.
“This is the most
diverse generation in
history,” said Heather
Smith, the president of
Rock the Vote, a
nonpartisan youth
political advocacy
group. “They’re also
optimistic, and don’t
participate in all the
fear-mongering.”
Obama could rouse this
generation to help save
the oil-choked gulf,
much the way
Franklin Roosevelt
did with his youthful
Civilian Conservation
Corps. While still
holding BP
accountable, the
president could set up a
millennial corps of
workers, calling on
their sense of service,
their desire for change,
their youthful belief in
restoration.
Besides, with news that
George W. Bush
is now on Facebook, what
better time to leave the
digital den?
