Mum Claxton
2008-11-02 14:43:59 UTC
Letter To a Young Voter
Posted by Jill Hussein C. at 3:44 PM on November 1, 2008.
All the effort in the world means nothing if you don't show up to
vote.
Dear young voter,
You and I have been arguing for years now about whether baby boomers
are to blame for the state of the world as it is today. You've told me
that we all sold out to Wall Street and greed, that WE are the ones
who put George W. Bush in office, that WE are the ones who supported
the Iraq War, that WE are the ones who threw your future away for
short-term gain. You've put Dennis Hopper out there as representative
of baby boomers even though he was born in 1936 -- a full ten years
BEFORE the beginning of the baby boom -- just because he played what
you think of as a hippie in a movie.
I have in my paper files a Tom Toles cartoon from 1987 called "The
Reading of the Will." It depicts a lawyer reading to five young people
from a piece of paper:
Dear kids,
We, the generation in power since World War II, seem to have used up
pretty much everything ourselves. We kind of drained all the resources
out of our manufacturing industries, so there's not much left there.
The beautiful old buildings that were build to last for centuries, we
tore down and replaced with characterless but inexpensive structures,
and you can have them. Except everything we built had a lifespan about
the same as ours, so like the interstate highway system we built,
they're all falling apart now and you'll have to deal with that. We
used up as much of our natural resources as we could, without
providing for renewable ones, so you're probably only good until about
a week from Thursday. We did build a generous Social Security and
pension system, but that was just for us. In fact, the only really
durable thing we built was toxic dumps. You can have those. So think
of your inheritance as a challenge. The challenge of starting from
scratch. You can begin as soon as -- oh, one last thing -- as soon as
you pay off the two trillion dollar debt we left you.
Your parents
Sounds familiar, doesn't it? Except that Tom Toles wrote that in 1987
-- twenty-one years ago -- when I, born in the peak years of the baby
boom, was thirty-two years old and Barack Obama, born at the tail end
of the boom in 1964, was twenty-three.
He wrote that about my parents' generation.
I know it is the fate of every generation to be loathed by those that
follow. The parental curse is always "I hope someday you have kids who
behave the way you do and then you'll understand." Then, unless you do
what I did and not have children, the parental curse comes through and
your parents get to laugh at you. That's the reward parents get, I
suppose, for putting up with teenagers.
There are certainly baby boomers who sold out. There are also many who
never had to. The vast majority of us aren't living in McMansions or
driving Hummers and we aren't living beyond our means. Yes, some of us
were fortunate and were able to buy homes that were affordable; though
Mr. Brilliant and I were forty-one before the combination of home
prices and our savings were close enough for us to buy, and even then
we only bought what and when we could afford to.
I thought at one time that I never wanted to sell out. I was like John
Cusack in Say Anything:
http://www.alternet.org/blogs/peek/105722/
...except that I thought "meaningful work" was working in "glamor
industries" like advertising and book publishing for peanuts. So I did
Posted by Jill Hussein C. at 3:44 PM on November 1, 2008.
All the effort in the world means nothing if you don't show up to
vote.
Dear young voter,
You and I have been arguing for years now about whether baby boomers
are to blame for the state of the world as it is today. You've told me
that we all sold out to Wall Street and greed, that WE are the ones
who put George W. Bush in office, that WE are the ones who supported
the Iraq War, that WE are the ones who threw your future away for
short-term gain. You've put Dennis Hopper out there as representative
of baby boomers even though he was born in 1936 -- a full ten years
BEFORE the beginning of the baby boom -- just because he played what
you think of as a hippie in a movie.
I have in my paper files a Tom Toles cartoon from 1987 called "The
Reading of the Will." It depicts a lawyer reading to five young people
from a piece of paper:
Dear kids,
We, the generation in power since World War II, seem to have used up
pretty much everything ourselves. We kind of drained all the resources
out of our manufacturing industries, so there's not much left there.
The beautiful old buildings that were build to last for centuries, we
tore down and replaced with characterless but inexpensive structures,
and you can have them. Except everything we built had a lifespan about
the same as ours, so like the interstate highway system we built,
they're all falling apart now and you'll have to deal with that. We
used up as much of our natural resources as we could, without
providing for renewable ones, so you're probably only good until about
a week from Thursday. We did build a generous Social Security and
pension system, but that was just for us. In fact, the only really
durable thing we built was toxic dumps. You can have those. So think
of your inheritance as a challenge. The challenge of starting from
scratch. You can begin as soon as -- oh, one last thing -- as soon as
you pay off the two trillion dollar debt we left you.
Your parents
Sounds familiar, doesn't it? Except that Tom Toles wrote that in 1987
-- twenty-one years ago -- when I, born in the peak years of the baby
boom, was thirty-two years old and Barack Obama, born at the tail end
of the boom in 1964, was twenty-three.
He wrote that about my parents' generation.
I know it is the fate of every generation to be loathed by those that
follow. The parental curse is always "I hope someday you have kids who
behave the way you do and then you'll understand." Then, unless you do
what I did and not have children, the parental curse comes through and
your parents get to laugh at you. That's the reward parents get, I
suppose, for putting up with teenagers.
There are certainly baby boomers who sold out. There are also many who
never had to. The vast majority of us aren't living in McMansions or
driving Hummers and we aren't living beyond our means. Yes, some of us
were fortunate and were able to buy homes that were affordable; though
Mr. Brilliant and I were forty-one before the combination of home
prices and our savings were close enough for us to buy, and even then
we only bought what and when we could afford to.
I thought at one time that I never wanted to sell out. I was like John
Cusack in Say Anything:
http://www.alternet.org/blogs/peek/105722/
...except that I thought "meaningful work" was working in "glamor
industries" like advertising and book publishing for peanuts. So I did