President Bernie Sanders: Millennials Are Taking Back Their Country
The Millennial Generation’s parents are complaining about younger people, but look at the world they’re leaving us: the world is ablaze like a furnace, and the economy we are inheriting is a dry sponge that the superrich of the older generation has squeezed to wring out every possible late-life billion.
Baby Boomers typically describe the Millennial generation as coddled, but Millennials are anything but. Read the news: what is coddling about the world in 2016?
On a personal level, Boomers mock us for our supposed everyone-gets-a-trophy mentality, but Millennial youth are not the ones sheltered from reality when every child HAS to get an award. Boomers are looking at it in the wrong direction. Millennial children did not create this culture of everyone’s-a-winner: their parents did.
It’s not children who go to award shops and buy all the participation trophies for themselves and their friends. It’s their parents who have something emotionally wrong with them, leaving them incapable of accepting the reality that their kids may be normal and only averagely-gifted at sports, school, or any other adolescent competition intended to fulfill their parental dreams or expectations.
It’s Millennials’ parents who mandate that every kid gets a trophy to make themselves feel better that their unimpressive, underperforming children are actually worthy of awards. Children inherently understand winning and losing, and the unnecessarily inclusive culture that Boomers love to criticize did not develop because Millennials are the ones who are emotionally incapable of dealing with failure.
Millennials are fully aware of failure, and they see it when they look at the world they are inheriting. Baby Boomers have failed us. The future Millennial world sucks, and it’s because the American economy, society and climate have been hollowed out by billionaires who cannot handle the failure that they’ll never become trillionaires. The world has been carved out by greedy Boomers salivating for a retirement of selfish grandeur financed by selling every last brick of morality and community cornerstoning our capitalistically, communally, and environmentally rich nation.
Millennials are getting the shaft because the conservative Baby Boomer generation has ruined everything, from Reagan’s Trickle Up presidency, through Dubya’s neoconservative hubris, to today’s hyper-partisan Republican Party shamelessly and senselessly slandering an impressively competent and sometimes frustratingly moderate Obama Administration. Real, peaceful and democratic revolution is building as Millennials are getting old enough to vote and participate in the national debate.
And the most beautifully ironic aspect of this revolution is that the presidential candidate winning the youth’s 2016 political support by an unprecedented landslide is the oldest candidate running. He is a 73-year-old grumpus with comically unkempt hair, who points his finger at all the bullshit he will not allow to ruin the future of the country’s grandchildren.
He is a man who hasn’t retired to New England tranquility yet because if everyone else has given up on democracy he goddamn hasn’t. He’s legitimately pissed off that politics has become such a self-serving, self-destructive industrial complex, and he has vowed to give America’s prosperity back to the people: the young Millennials who are motivated and connected enough to radically transform and save humanity.
Which is exactly why Bernie Sanders has become a digital celebrity for young people. The Internet Age has upended American politics, and nothing is more indicative of this than a Millennial revolution led by the longest-serving independent senator running the most democratic and populist campaign in history by appealing to young people’s passion for a political restoration.
His is the first, truly digital campaign, and Bernie is running for president as the ONLY candidate denying corporate money in order to Socratically live and lead by example. He is a genuinely honest and passionate representative of the people, and Sanders is building society up rather than tearing it apart by boldly refusing to allow Republicans to fear-monger their way back into the Presidency or divide us by religion or ethnicity. America has real societal problems that we can no longer hide with conservative tax cuts and bombing adventures, and this is exactly why the revolution is impending: conservatism is a sham and a hoax.
Bernie Sanders is the liberal hero for Millennials in Election 2016 because, since Reagan, the conservative Baby Boomer generation has paid far less taxes than their parents did in the 1940s and 50s and 60s, and they have gotten far more out of it, all the while deriding government as a thieving and corrupt institution bent on taking advantage of people and stealing their money. The Baby Boomer generation has gutted their parents’ stabilized, post-Depression and post-war economy because they got the riches of prosperity without having to work for it. Their success has been in destroying governmental competency in order to validate their claims that rich people should not have to give money back to society.
So, now that the Millennial generation is beginning to inherit the clusterfuck world, it is time to start taxing rich, old people. They got rich by convincing a sell-out Republican Party to give the biggest tax savings to the top bracket over the last three and half decades, and, now that they are going to die soon, they need to give the billions of dollars that their douchey aristocratic grandchildren couldn’t possibly spend back to the American society that blessed their lives with such opportunity and material comfort so that cities can have drinkable water and cancer patients do not have to die in order to pay for their children to be able to eat.
The social-democratic revolution behind Bernie Sanders did not have to be inevitable, but America’s social-Darwinist superrich sure have sped it along.
I’m a baby boomer and I don’t feel I ruined everything for you. but something happened and people were told that protesting the war was not patriotic, so we just removed ourselves from the political conversation for 30 or 40 years keeping our noses to the grindstone and just noticed now that Bernie has pointed it out, that it sucks for all of us and there is no future in it for you, and there is no difference between the dems and the gop and they are all on the take and that is politically correct in their opinion to be that way. don’t worry we are awake now.
Preach it, my friend.
Where is Gen X in all this? At this point in time, boomers are more apt to be grandparents of millennials than parents. The problem with this article is that it makes sweeping generalizations. Boomers are NOT all money-sucking and self-centered. MANY were children of the 60’s who participated in (and still support) social causes such as civil rights, equality between the sexes, and environmental preservation, to name a few. Bernie Sanders himself came up in the 60’s. Yet again and again, I read the same simplistic claim: “boomers took everything and left millennials nothing.” Were there no ruthless business tycoons in Gen X? Will all millennials be unselfish? People are people! There is good and bad in every generation.
“There was The Greatest Generation. It was followed, to my shame, by my generation, The Racist Generation, the “Baby Boomers” and those in their sway now voting for Trump. Now we have a new young generation of “Millenials” who will change the Nation. I apologize for the failure of my generation to secure your future. You must seize it. Proud of you.” – PawPaw.
When you “removed” yourself, you failed. Own it.
Such entitled, self centered anger. I’m a Boomer hippie and boy, if you expected to inherit a perfect world, you don’t even deserve a participation trophy.
And don’t call my people “conservative”. Some are, but a lot of us marched against Vietnam and listened to Dr King. When you were that age, you were playing computer games.
As an older Gen X parent, our kids are just now coming of voting age, and a huge majority of us are voting with them for Bernie.
There’s a generation between the Greatest and the Boomers, appropriately called the Silents and mostly overlooked like Gen X.
Ironically the tone of this article sounds like a Flower Child pontificating about how dosing Nixon will save the world.
As a mother of a Millennial, I approve every single word!!!! This article is meticulously spot on!
Bravo, Levi Olson. Bravo.
Of your many splendid statements here, the one that elicits my greatest huzzah is: “…the young Millennials who are motivated and connected enough to radically transform and save humanity.”
I was born at the tail-end of the boomers, which may explain why I see “identity” politics as the cul-de-sac it’s become. We are all in this together, sink or swim. Standing up for our individual right to self-determination remains a necessary principled action, yet must evolve into reciprocal collective action — the basis of the Bernie Sanders campaign.
My Millennial son has faced anger, depression, ennui, and inspiration in witnessing the prospective futures ahead. And he has determined that capitulation to the status quo offers no solution whatsoever, and that drowning in complacency assures the victory of the nefarious forces you indict.
Rather, We The People must heed your critique and own our self-aggrandizement, and begin thinking of All Generations, All Peoples, all “strata” of society. And, indeed, all and every expression of being — human and beyond — sharing habitation of this miraculous Gaia.
You say all this so well, even employing your righteous anger to inspire, rather than shame, and I applaud you for it. And I have shared your post on my facebook page more than once, because re-reading it affords such inspiration. As I wrote there:
• Dept. of •P•L•E•A•S•E• Read This
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I’ve re-read this again and again, and consider it among the most eloquent and >necessary< statements of this election cycle, and perhaps of the last several years.
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This article, in exquisite prose and reasoning, explains our current situation and its causes with cogency and honesty, from the perspective of the inheritors of the mess we "elders" seem content to sustain by supporting such utterly compromised status quo charlatans as HRC and Drumpf.
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•P•L•E•A•S•E• Read. You don't "have to" agree. Just understand.
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Re-posted with thoughts for Skywise Dru Baisden, who in discussing this state of affairs with me illuminated his sensibility and concern, without any resort to complacency or defeat. Bravo, son!
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And Bravo, Levi Olson. Bravo.
(P.S. Please fix the typos and unintended word omissions. Ha.)
Pure deflecting claptrap, with resort to malign straw man stereotyping and fallacious imputation of “expectation” without any substantive address of Levi’s just indictment.
This is a nonsensical and substances response.
≥ substanceless ≈ insubstantial
“…so we just removed ourselves from the political conversation for 30 or 40 years keeping our noses to the grindstone…”
And enjoyed and capitulated to the proffered affluence offered by the U.S.A. military industrial war machine despite the implications and costs that inspired the protests.
Yes, you were told you were “unpatriotic.” Because that is one of the signal tools in the hands of the status quo to maintain itself.
Your failing was not in protesting. It was in capitulating.
I understand. Those were dire times with hard choices, between reaction and revolution.
But the math was wrong, as Bernie Sanders (among others before him) have tried to emphasize: reaction and revolution are two sides of the same zero-sum game.
We need resolution.
And Levi’s statement is a first step in acknowledging and owning the issues requiring that resolution, and our resolve in facing them.
As Jefferson Airplane (a resonant example here) insisted, “We are volunteers for America.”
In other words, to Question Authority and its prerogatives is the very basis of actual patriotism.
But when “Up Against The Wall” became an apparent do-or-die proposition, too many “yippies” became “yuppies” — another effective tool, that of cooptation, of the corporate commercial system, in which everything becomes an echo in a lidded box.
So, we sold ourselves to the system intent on eating us. And it has. Glad you’re awake now.
Removing ourselves— for 30 or 40 years! — assured the triumph of the nefarious forces now in stranglehold possession of the rich legacy offered us as “Americans.”
The forces that fomented Vietnam now have us immersed in Iraq and Afghanistan — neither for “national security” nor for “democracy,” but for bankrupting the nation (that is, extracting this great nation’s wealth while emasculating its federal representative government) and for war-profiteering.
Glad you’re awake now.
“We should be together,” as Jefferson Airplane also said. “Come on, all you people standing around. Life is to fine to let it die.”
Seven Generations, Mervin. Right On.