Friday, August 29, 2008

My Generation Spoke

I wrote this after the Iowa Caucus (before I entered the blogosphere) and as we look back, we see that night as the launch of the legitimacy and competency of the Obama candidacy. Last night that candidacy was affirmed and celebrated, rightfully so, it was the largest and most sophisticated of any political campaign in the history of our country, and its not over yet...

January 3, 2008
I sat here tonight watching my generation stand up (in whatever small part) to make their voice heard on a national (in some parts global) level. I write to you as a 24 year old lifelong conservative, who much like yourself supported Bush in his early years but grew weary of his faith based motives suffocating our basic faiths in the American system domestically and abroad. I guess the biggest thing that made me smile tonight is that hope for a united America seemed to win for once. I have watched politicians (in my short life of following politics) get up and tell me they will get past partisan politics, but there was something inside of me, deep down, from I don't know where, that told me not to believe it. It told me they couldn't escape the chains and shackles of our modern Political system. Something that told me it could never happen with the type of country we had morphed into. The type of country that could give more daily hits to people.com than thenytimes.com. That is what saddened me about my generation, its what saddened me about the American political system its what I thought I would have to witness the remaining years of my life.
 
But tonight sitting here watching that Senator from my hometown of Chicago, I smiled wide and hard, and I felt that joy release from that uneasy feeling I had deep down inside me... I don't know if you can put a price on that. It was that joy that completely reversed the tables, that made that cynicism I had for my generation turn to optimism. I sit here accepting the notion that the people of my generation may not read, understand, and discuss the headlines of the New York Times more than they do People Magazine (at least for the near future). But I think what happened in Iowa tonight deserves a turn of the head, a raise of the eyebrow, a pause... from us young voters outside of Iowa to those who stood up for a valuable democratic process inside Iowa. It deserves that because it shows us the meaning of a voice in democracy, the power it can have within our nation and within our world. That's what came out of me tonight, my HOPE is that it was mutual.