2008: The birth of the Idealistic Era

With Nov 4 only a few steps around the corner, a victor is visibly in sight. Not Obama. Definitely not McCain. No, the victor is the electorate, particularly Latinos (2008-latino-voter-survey) and the youth (2008-youth-voter-trends). There is a chorus from conservatives and liberals alike of how mobilized American voters are this year.

Voter registration rates in most corners of the nation are at historic highs. African American voter registration rates are way up. White voters in the suburbs are building bridges with their neighbors. Latino voters are pumped up. Asian American voters are coming out of the woodwork.

And the youth — well, the youth are on the streets precinct-walking, organizing their peers and their elders because of a deep hunger for new ideas and a brighter future that they can almost taste, that animates their hearts and their minds.

Whether the result of a loud, protracted campaign, or the consequence of a new era built around a rejection of the hollow materialism of last 30+ years, the electorate is so much stronger, so much more vital. And in a strong democracy, that is always a big win.

I don’t think we have entered a new protest era. I don’t think we feel alienated by our government; I don’t think us rebelling against authority.

What I do think is that many of us feel sick and tired of being sick and tired, of living paycheck-to-paycheck despite a full-time job and a sideline, of not quite making it despite our good effort and a solid education.

We act because the recipe for success is flawed. We act because it is in our interest to act. We are pragmatic activists, and we are different from the activists of the 1960s.

While we share with ’60s activists the desire to see a world as it should be, we are less naive, less dysfunctional, less confined by ideology. Our drug is our poverty. We know the pitfalls of the right- and left-wing extremes, and we are intimately familiar with the irrelevance of the apathetic.

Our generation’s activism walks the less traveled “third way”: powered not by rebellion but by a need to blaze a more responsible path ahead, guided not by ideology but by the lessons of the past and the present. We are swelling the new segment of American social-political life: the Independents.

Our activism is data-driven. Easy access to information gives us instant knowledge of our impact on the environment, of the voting records of those candidates who court us, and of the minute-by-minute developments in every part of the world.

Our generation is a more politically self-aware, more politically-sophisticated; thanks, in large part, to wider access to information. Our generation is simply more plugged-in. And because we are more plugged-in, we are more aware of events around us; and many of us are using this opportunity to become more critical-thinking voters.

The sheer volume of data at our fingertips points us toward adult analyses of the world. We don’t rely on the broadsheets to explain the financial crisis to us, we have wikipedia. We don’t lack the opportunity to review any issue, we have google. We are not shaped by big media, we blog.

Because of our access to information, there is a deep confidence in how we assess our understanding of the world. And for all of these, we are better.

I believe we are entering a truly new era, an Idealistic Era, an era that will re-work the American way of life, that will tackle global warming, that will flatten the power imbalance between the races.

We are fortunate to be part of the Idealistic Era. Future generations will look to this era the same way we now look nostalgically to the protest era of the 1960s.