We should know in about 30 hours what direction the U.S. has chosen to go in. Will we choose expansiveness and optimism or will we choose exclusion and fear? Regardless of which candidate wins the election – either popular vote or electoral college – like all presidential elections in America it comes down to a choice of the lesser of two evils.
Which candidate do you think is going to do the best for you? Which candidate is going to do the least amount of harm to everyone else while doing you good? Those are the only two questions that should be considered in picking a candidate, but I wonder how many people even think about that second one.
And there’s plenty going on besides the presidential election. California is a hotbed of propositions this year: everything from humane treatment of farm animals (Prop 2) to requiring government owned utilities to generate 20% of their energy from renewable sources by 2010 (Prop 7) to same-sex marriage rights (Prop 8). Florida has an anti same-sex marriage initiative (Amendment 2) on the ballot as does Arizona (Prop 102) where they’re also considering reforms to the payday loan industry (Prop 200). Washington state voters will have to consider whether or not they want terminally ill adults with 6 or fewer months to live to be able to obtain lethal prescriptions (Initiative Measure 1000) and voters in Maryland will pull the lever either for or against slot machines.
Thing of it is, the reason I will be most glad that the election is over has nothing to do with the end of the constant campaign commercials which we’re getting for the first time in a while where I live because Virginia is now a swing state. Nor does it have anything to do with “hope” or “change” or putting “country first.” No, the reason I’m glad the election will be over is that maybe, if we’re bloody lucky, the mainstream media will stop blathering about the wondrous unification between the baby boomers and the millennials.
Of course they’re united; the baby boomers, the most self-centered group of people every to walk the planet, the group that was the “Me Generation” birthed the millennials, the “Right Now Generation,” and are the same people who can’t let their kids go. This is the generation that turned us into a nation of weenies who are too afraid of pedophiles to let kids play in their own yards but instead have to buy a Wii Fit system to so their kids get any exercise.
Is my generation more enlightened than my parents’ generation? Quite likely, yes. We came of age just as AIDS was breaking big in the world and saw the progression of thought from the beginning, from the days when patients had trouble getting care through the days of ACT-UP and on through the 90s when protease inhibitors first came on the scene and gave the HIV positive hope for something vaguely resembling a normal lifespan. And we saw it all when we were old enough to know what was going on. We’ve seen recessions – three major ones, two of which hit us right smack in the beginning of our adult lives – and the current war in Iraq is the second of our adult lives. We’ve seen the cost first hand in the missing faces at our high school and college reunions.
In very many ways, we are the ones with the most to lose in this election: the country goes in the wrong direction and we’re pretty much fucked, stuck smack in middle age, dug in with kids and mortgages and impending college tuition to pay and little if no time to rebuild. Yet we are the ignored demographic, polled and caressed only as part of other subgroups (female? black? single mom? church goer?) that have been drawing media attention.
And part of me resents this, part of me resents the fact that my generation is staggering along, shouldering the burdens that come with middle age without, seemingly, our chance in the spotlight. Yet, quietly, ever so quietly something else has dawned on me: when no one is paying attention to you is the time when you have the freedom to do whatever you please. This is not such a bad thing.
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