Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter have remarked, in light of Mitt Romney’s recent failed bid for the presidency, that they have “lost the country.”
Yes, they have.
They’ve lost it to my generation and yours – Generation X and Y, to the Millenials.
We believe in moving the country further forward into the 21st century and not backward to the 19th. We are well-positioned to move the United States in that direction, because . . .
We believe this great nation shouldn’t discriminate or legislate on the basis of religion. Your relationship with your God(s) is personal, and your choice to engage in worship or not is yours alone. It should be used to inform your personal decisions on how to live, but not on your beliefs on how to run a government.
We believe that this country shouldn’t discriminate on the basis of gender or gender identity, and we believe that the love between two consenting adults is a beautiful thing that should be fostered wherever it seeks to take root.
We are a generation that does not fear race. We believe that the diversity of racial affiliations in our communities are value-added, not a danger to be feared. Most of us are descendants of immigrants; we cannot maintain the legacy of the American Dream on a platform of xenophobia.
We understand that the Earth is a beautiful place to live, an oasis in the stark hostility of a magnificently grand and complicated universe. We should preserve as much of it as we can for future generations, not just exploit it for the sole benefit of the present. For now, the Earth and each other are all we have, and we should act to preserve both.
Our generation understands that success is built not only on our own hard work, but also that of our surrounding community. We are surrounded by others whose contributions we rarely acknowledge or fairly compensate. The teachers, police officers, soldiers, firefighters, janitors, CSRs, CNAs, truck drivers, trash collectors, and many others – all of them make contributions that our modern society requires to exist in its present state. Without them, CEO’s would have to pick up their own trash. In fact, maybe that’s something we should require of them every now and again.
We believe that a person’s value can be determined from what’s in their heart and not from what’s in their wallet. Money can buy many things, very few of them important. The important things – respect, true friends, or lasting love – cannot be bought.
We expect cooperation, compromise, and collective responsibility, because we are our brother’s keeper. Though we expect everyone to pull their own weight, we recognize that illnesses and disability do not only strike the lazy. We must help the poor and sick among us, not demonize them; but for a twist of fate, it could easily be us.
So, no. You cannot “have your country back.” You’ve had your chance to experiment and implement your vision, and it has failed spectacularly. Your “solutions,” if they can be called that, frankly scare the bejesus out of the rest of us.
To their credit, those in power recognize (and sometimes lament) that we, “their children”, are going to inherit the deficits and mistakes of our current government. If it’s true that they are incompetent stewards who are unable to protect our inheritance from further erosion, maybe we should fire them and take responsibility for it now. We certainly cannot do much worse.
Of course our generation does not agree on everything, and we don’t have all the answers, but none of our predecessors have either. We will make mistakes, and won’t perfectly fix all of the problems we face, and may even create new ones in the process. But these mistakes will not ruin America any more than the mistakes of previous generations. Americans are too resilient for that.
The world is amazing, and it’s evolving fast. Technology is now an irreversibly integral part of our culture, and paradigms change rapidly. We have to adapt our strategies and move quickly if we want to stay competitive in the global marketplace. Perhaps our parents’ generation, which still uses AOL dialup, if they use the internet at all – is ill-suited for this purpose. Perhaps it is good thing that the current regime is losing ground. Perhaps the time has come for our generation to take control of our own destiny.
Given our vision for the future, that day cannot come soon enough.