May 30, 2020

A Modest Proposal

I have just a couple of wee changes to propose.

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I have a constitutional amendment in mind:

Section 1: No person born before 1965 shall be eligible to vote in any federal, state, or municipal election.

Section 2. No person born before 1965 shall be allowed to hold any elective office of the United States or any of the States thereof.

Section 3. That is all.

Sure, I’m joking. Or am I? I don’t really care what else us oldsters do. We should still get our Medicare and our Social Security. We can retire or keep on working. We can take our cruises, or we can sit around watching Fox News and bitching about the kids these days. We can write newspaper columns or compete for Nobel prizes or catch up on Netflix. Whatever. But we no longer get to tell the rest of you what to do.

This is not because I think boomers are responsible for everything bad in the world. We aren’t. But God almighty, I am sick of every last thing turning into yet another replay in our endless battle over the ’60s. Climate change. Pandemics. (Pandemics!) Artificial intelligence. Civil rights. Marijuana. Income inequality. Cold wars. LGBTQ rights. The Oxford comma. Everything. And it won’t end until every last one of us is finally hauled off to the afterlife to continue arguing about it there while Jesus rolls his eyes at us.

Donald Trump is, perhaps, the final, panicked version of this. But it’s not his world anymore. It’s not my world. We boomers will be dead by the time most of these things finally start to irreversibly ruin the country and the planet. It’s time for us to turn things over to the Xers and Millennials and get out of their way.

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AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

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