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Tag: millennials
#EndorseThis: Dangerous Comic Says You’d Better Vote, Or Else…

#EndorseThis: Dangerous Comic Says You’d Better Vote, Or Else…

Comedian Lewis Black doesn’t like what he is hearing from voters — especially millennial voters — about their plans for Election Day. In fact, he’s outraged. After all, Black and his fellow celebrities have tried persuading, cajoling, mocking, beseeching, and begging, without satisfactory results. Listening to some young Americans whine that casting a ballot is too difficult or they just don’t like any of the candidates has made the grouchy comic even angrier than usual. So now he has turned to threatening.
And if that “decorative hate squash” Donald Trump becomes president, don’t say Lewis Black didn’t warn you what he plans to do:
Sanders and the Snapchat Liberals

Sanders and the Snapchat Liberals

If the polls hold, scoring tickets to “Hamilton” will be as good as it’s going to get for Bernie Sanders in New York. But let us first linger in Wisconsin, where Democrats and independents gave Sanders what looked like a decisive win.

It seems that 15 percent of Sanders’ Wisconsin supporters voted only for Bernie, leaving the rest of the ballot blank. By contrast, only 4 percent of Hillary Clinton voters skipped the down-ballot races.

It happens that one of the down-ballot races was for Wisconsin Supreme Court justice. The progressive, JoAnne Kloppenburg, had a good chance of toppling Rebecca Bradley, a right-wing appointee of Gov. Scott Walker’s. But Kloppenburg lost, in part because of the laziness of Snapchat liberals.

Snapchat is a messaging app that makes photos and videos disappear after they are viewed. Its logo is a ghost. Snapshot liberals are similarly ephemeral. They regard their job as exulting in the hero of the moment. Once the job is done, they vanish.

(An interesting wrinkle is that 10 percent of Sanders’ voters checked the box for Bradley. This suggests that a good chunk of his win came not from fans but from conservatives seeking to frustrate the Clinton candidacy.)

Anyhow, three days later, a Wisconsin circuit court judge struck down an anti-union law backed by Walker. The law ended unions’ right to require that private-sector workers benefiting from their negotiations pay dues or an equivalent sum.

The ruling was hailed as a “victory for unions,” but that victory will almost certainly be short-lived because the matter now heads to a divided state Supreme Court. As a Supreme Court justice, Kloppenburg could have helped save it.

Sanders can’t directly take the rap for this. He, in fact, had endorsed Kloppenburg.

But the Sanders campaign rests on contempt for a Democratic establishment that backs people like Kloppenburg. It sees even the normal give-and-take of governing as thinly veiled corruption. Liberals involved in the necessary horse trading are dismissed as sullied beyond repair.

TV comedy news reinforces this cartoonish view of what governing entails. The entertainers deliver earnest but simple-minded sermons on how all but a chosen few folks in Washington are corrupt hypocrites. (I find their bleeped-out F-words so funny. Don’t you?)

Snapchat liberals tend to buy into the “great man” theory of history. So if change comes from electing a white knight on a white horse, why bother with the down-ballot races?

Hence the irritating pro-Sanders poster: “Finally a reason to vote.”

Oh? Weren’t there reasons to vote all these years as tea party activists stocked Congress with crazy people? Wasn’t giving President Obama a Congress he could work with a reason to vote? (The liberal savior in 2008, Obama saw his own Snapchat fan base evaporate come the midterms.)

When asked whether he’d raise money for other Democrats if he were to win the nomination, Sanders replied, “We’ll see.”

Bernie doesn’t do windows and toilets. That’s for establishment Democrats.

The difference between the pitchfork right and the Snapchat left is this: The right marches to the polls to vote the other side out. The left waits for saintly inspiration. If the rallies are euphoric and the Packers aren’t playing the Bears, they will deign to participate. Then they’re gone in a poof of righteous smoke.

It is a crashing irony that many liberals who condemn voter suppression by the right practice voter suppression on themselves. The liberal version doesn’t involve onerous ID requirements at the polls. It comes in the deadening message that few candidates are good enough to merit a vote.

And that’s why progressive America routinely punches below its weight on the national stage.

Follow Froma Harrop on Twitter @FromaHarrop. She can be reached at fharrop@gmail.com. To find out more about Froma Harrop and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Web page at www.creators.com.

COPYRIGHT 2016 CREATORS.COM

Photo: Supporters of Democratic U.S. presidential candidate Bernie Sanders listen during a Sanders rally at Safeco Field in Seattle, Washington March 25, 2016. REUTERS/David Ryder

Can The Donald Lose a Little?

Can The Donald Lose a Little?

“We are going to win and win. We are going to win so much you are going to come to me and say, ‘Mr. President, can’t we lose a little?'” — Donald Trump, March 4

What would a great leader be without a great crisis to cross paths with?

Where would Abraham Lincoln be without the Civil War or Franklin Roosevelt without the Great Depression or Winston Churchill without World War II?

Donald Trump is a hero — at least in his own mind — in search of something heroic to do. Building hyuge, vulgar buildings and slapping one’s own name on it lacks a certain heroic dimension.

As critic Joshua Rothman of The New Yorker wrote in a Feb. 29 essay, titled “Shut Up and Sit Down: Why the leadership industry rules,” people who “fetishize leadership sometimes find themselves longing for crisis” to prove themselves.

Much of Trump’s life appears to be like one long attempt at this — as long as no real danger or no real leadership is involved.

Rothman writes:

In January, “Donald Trump’s campaign released its first official TV advertisement. The ad features a procession of alarming images — the San Bernardino shooters, a crowd at passport control, the flag of Syria’s Al Nusra Front — designed to communicate the idea of a country under siege. But the ad does more than stoke fear; it also excites, because it suggests that we’ve arrived at a moment welcoming to the emergence of a strong and electrifying leader.”

The millennials — the largest age group in America, followed by the baby boomers — are lucky if they can identify any hero who is still alive. A millennial is anyone who is or was between the ages of 18 and 34 in 2015, and one suspects that Trump gets his heroic status more from his reality TV shows than from his real estate deals.

He was born wealthy, went to good schools, inherited a small fortune, went into the family business and has managed to keep the wolf away from his (many) doors.

But wasn’t it always thus? “The rich get richer,” F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, “and the poor get — children.” Jesse Jackson, only about five years older than Trump, grew up in an era when the other children in his school taunted him for being born out of wedlock.

He sat in the back of the bus, not just metaphorically but literally. He drank out of water fountains marked “colored.” He grew up in Greenville, South Carolina, but attended the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign on a football scholarship.

In 1960, when he was 19, he came home on Christmas break and, like freshmen everywhere, left a lot of work to do until the last minute. The book he needed to finish a paper was not at the “colored” library in Greenville but was at the Greenville Public Library.

So Jackson walked in, but a policeman walked him out. It may have been 1960 elsewhere in America, but in the Jim Crow South, it was still 1892.

And Jackson did a most unexpected thing. No, not marching on the library. That came later. And no, not getting the law changed to make the reading facilities in town open to all. That, too, would come later.

What Jackson did upon being tossed out of that library was cry. Real, bitter tears. He was not afraid; he was a freshman quarterback for a Big Ten football team, so he wasn’t afraid of many people.

It was not fear. It was just the shame of the whole thing. The water fountains and the seats on the bus and even what book you were allowed to read.

His tears dried up. And Jackson went to work. In a few months, he and seven other black students returned to the whites-only library, got books, took seats, sat down and read.

About 20 minutes later, they were handcuffed, and they were jailed for 45 minutes.

“In the paper write-up about our arrest, I remember them calling us leftists,” Jackson would say later. “We weren’t left; we were right.” A small joke.

The libary closed and reopened two months later as an integrated facility.

On the 50th anniversary, the Greenville Eight held a reunion. Only four  of the original eight showed up, but that was OK. It made the speeches shorter.

“Somehow we all finished college,” Jackson said, “and went on to replace old walls with new bridges.”

There are those who go through life building walls to keep others out. Others build bridges to welcome all in. You sometimes get to make that choice very early in your life. So think about it now.

Roger Simon is Politico’s chief political columnist. His new e-book, “Reckoning: Campaign 2012 and the Fight for the Soul of America,” can be found on Amazon.com, BN.com and iTunes. To find out more about Roger Simon and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Web page at www.creators.com.
COPYRIGHT 2016 CREATORS.COM

Photo: Rev. Jesse Jackson (C) joins demonstrators during a protest intending to disrupt Black Friday shopping in reaction to the fatal shooting of Laquan McDonald in Chicago, Illinois, November 27, 2015. REUTERS/Andrew Nelles

Calling All Millennials

Calling All Millennials

What are millennials thinking?

Every year, Beloit College offers a glimpse with its “mindset list,” which offers dozens of single-sentence declarations to reflect the current state of the familiar for incoming freshmen.

This year’s list, describing the mindset of the 2019 college graduate, indicates that, for these millennials, “first responders have always been heroes” (No. 36), “four foul-mouthed kids have always been playing in South Park” (No. 5) and “TV has always been in such high definition that they could see the pores of actors and the grimaces of quarterbacks” (No. 44).

Also on the list, at No. 9: “The announcement of someone being the ‘first woman’ to hold a position has only impressed their parents.”

Media coverage and recent voter turnout in the Democratic primaries in Iowa and New Hampshire indicate this is an accurate assessment of the millennial mind even when we are talking about electing the first woman to be president of the United States. If Hillary Clinton is to win over millennials, she will do so by emphasizing strengths beyond her gender.

This is not an unreasonable or insurmountable expectation, but as revelations go, it is a breathtaking one for many mothers of millennials. An army of strong mothers and the men who love them has raised children who see nothing special about a woman willing to speak her mind. Who predicted that one?

In my Kent State journalism classrooms, I am frequently on the receiving end of what’s on millennials’ minds. They are as opinionated and diverse as we baby boomers have always wanted to believe is true about ourselves.

The difference is that boomers have held center stage in public discourse for so long that we seem not to have noticed all those millennials entering, stage left. Our spotlight is dimming, my friends. Round of applause, please, for this generation that is not waiting for the invitation.

They have so much on their minds — and not just college debt. Let’s acknowledge that not all millennials toss their mortarboards into the air and trek off to four-year (or five-year or six-year) colleges. For too many of those who do, daily college life includes two or three jobs — not to afford extras, as was the case in my generation, but to pay the basic expenses to stay in school.

Climate change. Immigration. The economy. Race relations. Abortion rights. Millennials talk about all of this. They have more opinions than solutions — but doesn’t that sound just like us in our 20s? Let me save you the wasted energy of those “But — but — but!” denials: Yes, we were so very like them, my fellow boomers; the wind was at our backs as we pushed off the starting block into the rest of our lives. Off we went.

Remember how easily we rose from our chairs — man, I miss that — and how we couldn’t bare to consider how one day we would be precisely who we’ve become? Now here we are: older and maybe wiser (but let’s not bet our retirement on it), shading our eyes and squinting at the finish line.

Why were we in such a hurry?

We were young. That’s why.

We made the most of our youth or we squandered it, or maybe we ended up somewhere in between, but we’ve all arrived at the same place. The unthinkable has come to pass. The center of the universe has shifted, and we’re not in it. Our “Me” generation is outnumbered — and soon will be outranked — by a generation of young Americans not much interested in our monologues of remember when. They are the rebuke we once embraced, the twins to our younger selves.

Except.

Except that, unlike us, most of them have not grown up thinking it is their destiny to outrun their parents’ successes. Not even close. If you don’t believe me, ask them.

Better yet, let’s all of us listen to them. In prime time.

We’ve had enough presidential debates and town halls full of partisans and high-end donors who cackle and hoot like city folks at their first pig auction. This is no way to vet a president.

If we’re serious about the importance of millennial voters — and we’re all insisting that we are — then where are the forums to hear from them? Two televised town halls, one for each party, moderated by millennials for a millennial crowd, would be as instructive for millennials as it would for everyone clinging to their assumptions about them.

What do we have to fear?

There’s a list for you: The baby boomer mindset.

I’ll start.

No. 1: We are afraid of becoming irrelevant.

No. 2: Where did I put my car keys?

Connie Schultz is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist and professional in residence at Kent State University’s school of journalism. She is the author of two books, including “…and His Lovely Wife,” which chronicled the successful race of her husband, Sherrod Brown, for the U.S. Senate. To find out more about Connie Schultz (con.schultz@yahoo.com) and read her past columns, please visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.
COPYRIGHT 2016 CREATORS.COM