Today, they sent pictures. I’m glad I could take my glasses off and still look at my phone and see the pictures through big ugly happy tears.
My oldest girl was born days before Barack Obama was elected. My youngest daughter was born almost exactly two years later. Today is November 7, 2028. They sent me pictures of their ballots. Today, Generation O voted in its first presidential election.
I got Anna’s picture first. She’s younger, just 18 by a couple of days, so her mail-in ballot comes to the house. It came in a stack of mail with her Selective Service card that I hope she never has to use. She picked them up last week during a laundry run, then headed back to school. Her and her friends took each other’s pictures as they dropped their ballots off at the box outside of the school’s coffee shop.
Elsa’s picture came in after she got off work, Central Time. It was two pictures, first for the line at the neighborhood polling station. It crossed the parking lot. She labeled it “SHORT!” Ten minutes later came the second, standing at the terminal with her candidate lists, her blocky penmanship on 3x5 cards. Nice bit of analog in such a digital world. Maybe she takes after her dad a bit too much.
It didn’t seem like we would get here in those days after the 2016 election. The nastiest character anyone could imagine had just been elected, short of the popular vote but long on support from a lot of nastier sources. Looking from this spot in history, it can be hard to remember the stark division between jubilation and fear. I’ve tried to convey that to the girls over the years.
The passive stuff was straight forward. “We do not go to that restaurant anymore. Our friends are not safe there. We do not give that place money.” They understood that. “We will not see that movie. It does not build up the things we believe in.” Little harder sell, especially with the talking bunnies, but they got that too.
The passive stuff was straight forward. “We do not go to that restaurant anymore. Our friends are not safe there. We do not give that place money.” They understood that. “We will not see that movie. It does not build up the things we believe in.” Little harder sell, especially with the talking bunnies, but they got that too.
The active stuff was a bit more difficult to explain. “We are going to walk through downtown with signs.” “We are going to sit through this meeting and listen.” “We are going to skip vacation this year.” They were young enough to avoid some of the direct nastiness, fortunately.
Our friends, unfortunately, were not. We appropriated something out of African American history. The Green Book was published for thirty years after WWII, and showed Black travelers where there were safe places to eat and rest on the newly expanding highways. Someone started r/bluebook to list safe places for women and immigrants and people of color and LGBTQ folks to visit and spend their money.
It initially became a way for us white dudes to focus our spending. It felt necessary after the initial wave of reported harassment stopped being an initial wave. We were fortunate to be in a solid neighborhood of something called a “Sanctuary City.” Back then, you recall it was so tenuous for immigrants that individual jurisdictions made it a point that they were safe. We were determined not to take our community’s safety for granted and used our pocket books to enforce that. Then we needed to make sure our ballots did the same.
A couple weeks after the vote, the Democratic Party released a post-mortem on the election. To say that it missed the point misses the point. It actually used the phrase “paradigm for the 2020 campaign.” That night, millions of people across the country switched their party registration to “independent”. The following day, twice as many. The Democratic Party folded before the Electoral College was held.
There is a concept in forestry called a nurse log. When one of the giant trees in a forest dies and falls, it opens a hole in the canopy. Sunlight comes into places where it does not normally reach. The dead tree becomes fertile ground for a new generation of the forest. There was no Democratic Party left to be a nurse log. But there was a Republican Party. It’s interesting to look back and see the GOP’s desiccated corpse was being overrun while it was still in power. There are snapshots of that opposition in the diversity MiniPACs and Community Action Groups and p/issues groups today.
We tend to use the Portland Model for the MiniPACs I belong to. But the idea of these community based issue groups sprouted simultaneously in many places across the country, not just at that now famous donut stand south of here. Wherever sunlight hit the ground. No one wanted another round of the politics of personality, and we needed something bigger than individuals to fight the money. So we created political credit unions.
Our original MiniPAC started as a community group called The Committee for Coffee Holders (and a week before the Portland group got together!) It was a bunch of stay-at-home dads who just wanted to get coffee cup holders attached to swing-sets in playgrounds across town. We had to explain that you can NOT hold a coffee and do a proper underdog. People just understand this today.
That’s what Elsa had written on her candidate cards. She’s in four different MiniPACs and a handful of CAGs and got them in some sort of alignment on the issues this year. Anna, on the other hand… Well, we love Anna. She loves p/politics at the coffee shop.
I’d like to think it wasn’t just index cards and coffee shop selection that we passed on to the girls. They learned how to build a community. The 2016 election was the last one for our parents, the Baby Boomers, to be in power. They were a generation that inherited fully formed communities. They had churches and neighborhoods and workplaces handed to them. But they broke every one of those things.
Some of those things needed to be broken. The white-shirt-blue-tie boys club workplace had to go. Disinvested cities had to go. But the crap that the Boomers chose to create was even more asinine. Gated neighborhoods and double garages and the most epic sense of entitlement ever to cloak this country. They may not have individually wanted many of these things, but they let their money and their time make their choices for them.
Then my generation came along and got yelled at for being anxious and antisocial and enjoying the company of video games.
What our parents never understood is that those games connected us to other people. We shared our time, not with a screen, but with the mind of someone else on the other side of that screen. Whether it was the person who made the game or the person who played against us, it was the challenge of connection.
So when the Baby Boomers did what they did and ran the political party system into the ground, it’s kind of funny who was actually in a position to rebuild it. Those damn brats that spend all their time in front of the computers. We corrected the Boomer’s mistakes by building connections. Connections that made our money go further. Connections that made our time more valuable. Connections that made the impact of our opinions more potent. Connections that our parents never saw or appreciated.
I hope our girls see that is the work we did. Generationally, it’s unlikely. Your parents are always just the worst. So I will say it differently. I hope they appreciate this world they live in, a fairer and more connected place than where we were born.
Maybe I will go get that new set of glasses with the display right in the lens. Won’t have my face buried in the phone all the time. And I have a few years left before my era is done. Seems like a good time to try something new.
Our friends, unfortunately, were not. We appropriated something out of African American history. The Green Book was published for thirty years after WWII, and showed Black travelers where there were safe places to eat and rest on the newly expanding highways. Someone started r/bluebook to list safe places for women and immigrants and people of color and LGBTQ folks to visit and spend their money.
It initially became a way for us white dudes to focus our spending. It felt necessary after the initial wave of reported harassment stopped being an initial wave. We were fortunate to be in a solid neighborhood of something called a “Sanctuary City.” Back then, you recall it was so tenuous for immigrants that individual jurisdictions made it a point that they were safe. We were determined not to take our community’s safety for granted and used our pocket books to enforce that. Then we needed to make sure our ballots did the same.
A couple weeks after the vote, the Democratic Party released a post-mortem on the election. To say that it missed the point misses the point. It actually used the phrase “paradigm for the 2020 campaign.” That night, millions of people across the country switched their party registration to “independent”. The following day, twice as many. The Democratic Party folded before the Electoral College was held.
There is a concept in forestry called a nurse log. When one of the giant trees in a forest dies and falls, it opens a hole in the canopy. Sunlight comes into places where it does not normally reach. The dead tree becomes fertile ground for a new generation of the forest. There was no Democratic Party left to be a nurse log. But there was a Republican Party. It’s interesting to look back and see the GOP’s desiccated corpse was being overrun while it was still in power. There are snapshots of that opposition in the diversity MiniPACs and Community Action Groups and p/issues groups today.
We tend to use the Portland Model for the MiniPACs I belong to. But the idea of these community based issue groups sprouted simultaneously in many places across the country, not just at that now famous donut stand south of here. Wherever sunlight hit the ground. No one wanted another round of the politics of personality, and we needed something bigger than individuals to fight the money. So we created political credit unions.
Our original MiniPAC started as a community group called The Committee for Coffee Holders (and a week before the Portland group got together!) It was a bunch of stay-at-home dads who just wanted to get coffee cup holders attached to swing-sets in playgrounds across town. We had to explain that you can NOT hold a coffee and do a proper underdog. People just understand this today.
That’s what Elsa had written on her candidate cards. She’s in four different MiniPACs and a handful of CAGs and got them in some sort of alignment on the issues this year. Anna, on the other hand… Well, we love Anna. She loves p/politics at the coffee shop.
I’d like to think it wasn’t just index cards and coffee shop selection that we passed on to the girls. They learned how to build a community. The 2016 election was the last one for our parents, the Baby Boomers, to be in power. They were a generation that inherited fully formed communities. They had churches and neighborhoods and workplaces handed to them. But they broke every one of those things.
Some of those things needed to be broken. The white-shirt-blue-tie boys club workplace had to go. Disinvested cities had to go. But the crap that the Boomers chose to create was even more asinine. Gated neighborhoods and double garages and the most epic sense of entitlement ever to cloak this country. They may not have individually wanted many of these things, but they let their money and their time make their choices for them.
Then my generation came along and got yelled at for being anxious and antisocial and enjoying the company of video games.
What our parents never understood is that those games connected us to other people. We shared our time, not with a screen, but with the mind of someone else on the other side of that screen. Whether it was the person who made the game or the person who played against us, it was the challenge of connection.
So when the Baby Boomers did what they did and ran the political party system into the ground, it’s kind of funny who was actually in a position to rebuild it. Those damn brats that spend all their time in front of the computers. We corrected the Boomer’s mistakes by building connections. Connections that made our money go further. Connections that made our time more valuable. Connections that made the impact of our opinions more potent. Connections that our parents never saw or appreciated.
I hope our girls see that is the work we did. Generationally, it’s unlikely. Your parents are always just the worst. So I will say it differently. I hope they appreciate this world they live in, a fairer and more connected place than where we were born.
Maybe I will go get that new set of glasses with the display right in the lens. Won’t have my face buried in the phone all the time. And I have a few years left before my era is done. Seems like a good time to try something new.
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