GENERATION IS IMPORTANT TO CURRENT ELECTION

Before we become too confused about why younger Whites, as well as many Blacks, voted for Obama, keep in mind that people under 40 have no memory of segregation. In our area, the ones in the suburbs went to school with the Metco students, black children bussed in from the inner city by court decree. Parents may have minded, but the children, for the most part, accepted then as friends with a different skin color. Difference is noted, bias is not cultivated.

This election is, for this younger generation, what WWII was to those pulling together as a nation, keeping our hopes up by patriotic songs and supportive pep talks. They have pulled together in our country the way this election helped them to do. The thought of change energized them, while the distrusting, slippery-slope elders reacted with resistance to those ideas. This election introduced them to hope and empowered them in a way the previous administration had blinded them with fear and divisiveness only. Prior to the current economic crisis, they have not lived intimately with war, death, poverty, excessively high tuitions and unavailability of jobs. They were quick to respond to the difference in the campaigns between Obama and McCain. They believed that Obama heard them and wanted to make them a part of the solution to the country's problems. Because of the technological advantages, they are better briefed on what is going on in the world around them. They are more comfortable talking to their elders and can discuss on a more knowledgeable level than their parents and grandparents could with their elders. They understand more and can look up anything that is not clear to them without having to ask anyone else or wait to find the answer.

The world has gotten smaller during this generation. Whether our ambassadors speak to other nations or not, we can read their newspapers and know what they think of us and what they are all about. This generation also fears emotions less and values talk and negotiation more. While it may have been said to them, I doubt they realize the significance of 'they are the hope of the future of the USA'.

Obama has already demonstrated the natural way he treats all people with respect. The Republicans, when they eventually pull themselves back together as a semblance of a party that really stands for something useful, will have to realize that the Neocons and Fundamentalists no longer dictate to the majority of the US citizens. The contradiction of their position of less government but more laws limiting people's choice in their lives will no longer fool the majority.

We can share in the hope of a long and arduous road in the next few years to undo the disaster of the past eight years but we shall not travel the road feeling lonely. We are now Generation X and their children who are voting age or close to it.