An article I wrote about Pete Buttigieg
My Generation
There has always been bloodshed on American soil. From the Civil War of the 1860s to the race wars of the 1960s. But my generation, the generation born in the 1980s, has seen our own brand of turmoil.
We learned to associate the words Columbine, Sandy Hook, and Oklahoma City with innocent children dying. The first two? School shootings everyone born later in this generation are so familiar with. The latter, a heartless act of terrorism that took 168 people’s lives, 19 of which were children just being dropped off at daycare.
In 2001 our teachers turned on the news to show us two tall buildings, one of which was on fire. The news anchor said an airplane hit the World Trade Center; three words most of us had never heard in the same sentence. How could a pilot make a mistake that big? Was he drunk? Did the autopilot take over terminator-style?
Not long after the first plane hit, we got our answer. The cameras caught a second airplane very deliberately hitting the second tower, leaving us in silence. In real-time we watched the towers that would define the rest of our lives burn, collapse, and disappear in a cloud of smoke and fire.
Many of our fathers, brothers, and friends did not come back from wars overseas. They died in Vietnam, Korea, Europe, and the Pacific. But for them, the enemy was ‘over there’, away from our schools, cities, churches, and airports. The ones lucky enough to come home didn’t worry about their flight to visit family in Kansas being turned into a missile, or the person next to them having explosives packed in their shoes or underwear.
For the most part, prior generations didn’t have to worry about their kids at school; school was safe, just like church and flying. But all of that is different now. If we didn’t hear the screams firsthand, we heard the accounts given by crying children as they relived their trauma on national television. Our safe places have been picked apart one by one, from shopping malls, to running marathons, to country music festivals.
We all know, or know of, someone that would not talk about their experiences on the battlefield overseas because it was too traumatizing to relive. Yet we have returned to school, knowing it could be the next warzone. And people wonder why my generation gets a bad rap for being overly anxious.
Previous generations have paid unimaginable costs in life and limb on foreign battlefields, and I for one, am grateful the draft does not hang over my head. But just because we weren’t forced to serve, doesn’t mean we haven’t. The military is filled with men and women of my age, and much younger. As of this writing, there are young warriors serving in the deserts of Afghanistan and Iraq who never saw the twin towers standing. In our world, the days when the enemy were so easily defined as being ‘over there’, and we ‘over here’, have almost become relics of the past—casting us in a shadow of uncertainty.
We grew up in a world that told us a college education would get us a good job; only to find ourselves being crushed under an education debt that has shackled us to a location where our degree is worth no more than the paper it was printed on.
There is an illusion that our generation is earning bigger paychecks than our parents. While the numbers might be higher, we have only seen our purchasing power decline since we were born. Even with the advent of low-interest mortgages, first-time home buyers tax credits, and some products becoming cheaper by being manufactured in China our ability to live the American dream has almost disappeared. Has this caused some of us to give up and hope our parents can support us for as long as they can afford to? Absolutely.
But many of us are giving everything we have into a system that is rigged against us. We know our children are going to be crushed with even more debt and inflated prices than us, so we don’t save for retirement. And even though our lifespans have increased, so have our rates of cancer, asthma, and auto-immune disorders. While, at the same time, medical care and prescription costs have sky-rocketed; leaving millennial families to choose between taking the job they really want or staying at a sub-par job because they cannot afford to pay 90 days of COBRA insurance payments to keep their little girl with Chrohn’s disease, their wife with rheumatoid arthritis, or their son with diabetes healthy while they transition jobs. Our bodies are taking on the stressors of air and water filled with pollutants that will never break down. Our houses are being destroyed by floods, fires, and winds unlike anything generations past have witnessed.
We are accused of wanting the government to do everything for us. We are accused of being socialists, communists, and lazy. But that is a lie. We would just like to have a piece of the pie the generations before us had. At one time companies cared for the livelihood of their workers even through retirement. Modern employers are hoarding their money, outsourcing our jobs, replacing us with robots, making our education meaningless, and giving us part-time jobs with no benefits, while our government does nothing to protect us.
Long-term employment has become an expense to companies. They prefer turnover to paying seniority incentives, and many eventually leave the country altogether. Through the greed of people who will not live to see the future they have created for us, we are the first generation that stands to make less than our parents.
Credit has been called the act of paying the now at the expense of the future, and that is exactly what greed and corruption is doing to us. Corrupt companies, lobbyists, and elected representatives are making a fortune at the expense of our future.
The misconception that we hate the wealthy is simply not true.
We do not hate the wealthy, we want to be wealthy.
We do not want the government to do everything for us, we want the government to protect us.
We do not want someone to do all the work for us, we want the opportunity to have a dignified job.
We do not want the past!
We want a future that is bright, clean, and prosperous.
We cannot roll back the clock as some have promised. The word ‘again’ does not bring us any hope. We want to hear the words healthy, wealthy, and free.
We are not free if our student debt costs more than our parents’ entire existence.
We are not free if we can buy a gun but are unable to keep our children safe.
We are not free if a genetic disease cripples our finances and the bank forecloses on our home.
We are not free if all our jobs are replaced by automation and the only option left to us is to start a whole new career without any of the benefits we worked so hard to earn from companies that dumped us without warning.
Lastly, we are not free if our government can undo every social safety net our forefathers fore-fathers put in place for us.
Up until now, we have been too young to lead a country. By law, no one under the age of 35 can be president. But one of us in particular is 37.
He is the son of an immigrant, and a Navy Reserve Veteran who served his country in Afghanistan, while simultaneously serving his second term as the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, a city with a population over 100,000 residents. His name is Mayor Pete Buttigieg.
Don’t worry too much about the last name, because he doesn’t. Some say it is BOOT-a-JUDGE, while others prefer BOOT-EDGE-EDGE. “Say it three time real fast,” he’ll tell you, “and you’ll get to the same place.”
He is tall and slim, with striking blue eyes and dark brown hair with the slightest hints of grey. The first thing you will notice (other than his age) is how calm and collected he is. I have watched every video I could find on the internet and TV and never once have I seen him be argumentative or raise his voice. He doesn’t need to beg for your attention, he already has it. He doesn’t need to deflect your questions, he has the answers. And he doesn’t need to attack anyone to show you he is there.
He is part of a new generation of leaders who are like nothing we have had before. He rejects the false paradigm our representatives have designed for us. Real people want government to work for them more than they want to be part of a specific party. “Potholes and sewers don’t have R’s or D’s next to them.”
If elected president, he would be the first mayor ever to sit behind the resolute desk. He will bring his values to the office: “Caring for the sick and prisoner.” Whether you are an Episcopalian like him—or something else entirely—it cannot be denied we will all, at one time or another, have a time of need.
We need a president who empathizes with the common man, because he is a common man with a few pluses. He is a Harvard graduate and a Rhoads Scholar. He knows seven languages, one of which is Norwegian—he learned that just so he could read more books by his favorite author that weren’t translated into English.
He has a calming presence with a self-deprecating sense of humor that shows his true colors. I believe those colors are red, white, and blue, and I hope you will, too.
www.peteforamerica.com
*This is an independent article written by Blake Spurgin and is not endorsed by or otherwise affiliated with Pete Buttigieg or his exploratory committee.
@BlakeSpurgin
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