A Message To "Millennials"

I know it is hard to get excited about this election! For many, it is the first you will vote in. For most, the excitement that Barack Obama gave us in 2008 & 12, is gone now, replaced with the rather mundane "status quo" of normal politics and the relatively new obstructionism of the very sore losers. Barack Obama and Bernie Sanders were, are, exciting and give us hope. But that hope does not reside soley inside them, or any single politician! It resides in every human on this planet! It is the hopes and dreams of a better set of circumstances and a better life that we all share, regardless of any race, religion, or country of origin. It is a shared human emotion that allows us to get up each and every day and "go kill something and drag it home"!

So you are faced with the" lesser of two evils" in this election and both are undesirable? Welcome to life! I first heard that expression in 1960 when Richard Nixon and a CATHOLIC John Kennedy were our parents' choices. We survived. So far, we have always survived, though most elections are touted as a choice between" the lesser of two evils".

It does not help that both candidates are 70 years old and not very relevant to you. I know this too, at 64, I am not relevant to you either. Every generation of Mankind has been through this Life from being helpless at birth, to needing to know everything at 10 years old, to 20 years old and knowing everything, particularly those things we know nothing of..........  to (with luck) irrelevancy!

Your time will come, sadly. But it is a very long time off and you need to, you WILL live and savor every moment until one day you realize that the next generation, whatever it is called, has taken over.

This is "OUR" last hurrah, the "Baby Boomers". Time has moved us forward on Life's journey, robbed us of our unbridled energy and moved our leadership position in "the village" to one of sitting by the fire dispensing wisdom, welcome or not. It is not so bad, but it is inevitable!


Next election will be your turn. Next election will be yours to command and the world will be molded into YOUR vision. But that is next time. We still have this time and though there are several choices, the chance of leading this country and the world, rests in one of two people. We, YOU, must choose one, the right one for this moment, for this moment is all we have to determine our choice. History can look backwards at past choices, like the "Monday morning quarterbacks" do after the Sunday football games, each saying they would have done it differently. But on Sunday, or on November 8th, you don't have the benefit of hindsight.

Sure, you can choose NOT to vote, but in doing so you forfeit your right to complain about the outcome and the country's direction afterwards. You may also, allow Supreme Court justices to be appointed AND confirmed that will legislate away your right to choose what happens within your body. Old, white men will be telling women what they can and cannot do, as if they had any clue what it is like to BE a woman! Money will continue to be interpreted as "free speech" and those with lots of it will continue to be allowed to purchase politicians with their "free speech" (Citizens United). Uncle Charlie with his red-faced hypertension, who just lost his job because of it and the single Mother down the street with the epileptic daughter, won't be able to get insurance coverage AT ANY COST, because we will return to being the only developed country in the world without a national health care plan. Your chance to fix the flaws in the vehicle that is the Affordable Health Care Act will be gone! Had we stopped trying to build airplanes because Orville Wright crashed on the first attempt, the vehicle would never have been improved to the point it is today. Had we slammed the door on immigrants, at ANY point in our history, we wouldn't even be having this conversation!

This is the last time WE,  "boomers" will dominate. In four years the torch passes to you! It seems like yesterday that we were protesting an unpopular war, marching for equal rights, fighting in vain for the Equal Rights Amendment, lowering the age of majority, choosing a university, a spouse, a name for our first child....... but is was not yesterday!

You get the challenges now! You get the decisions now! YOU, get to be the adults now! One of your first adult decisions that will affect the rest of your relevant life, will be this election. There is the "lesser of two evils"....... then there is just evil.

Bigotry, prejudice, hatred, racism, mysongeny and narcissism have no place in the world that YOU will be relevant in! You would never consider having someone who never touched plumbing, repair your leaking faucet, someone who never looked under the hood of a car repair your brakes, or someone who never went to medical school remove your appendix. Do you really want someone who never spent a day in politics to step into the most difficult governing job on earth?

I spent 47 years working in this world. I voted for the first time in 1972 for the candidate whose vision of the world best suited my vision for the years that followed. Each election, I voted for the candidate who pledged to continue moving toward that goal. Now it is your turn! Vote on November 8th for a professional politician who can interact with all the other professional politicians in the world to solve the major problems facing the world, like man-made climate disruption!


Sure, it has been said that professional politicians are the reason we are in this "mess". But also ask this: had it not been for professional politicians working together, how much WORSE might it have become? Globalism was inevitable and difficult to manage for anyone! But how someone manages their own finances is a good indication of how they will manage the country's!


During the Nixon campaign of my first ever election, Nixon's slogan was: "This time, vote like your whole world depends on it!" In my 64 amazing years of life, that NEVER applied more than it does right now! Put Hillary Clinton in the White House and as my generation has done since Nixon, keep striving for a better candidate every time!