The only thing worse than a Democrat.....

I am now officially old. Twenty-nine. I turned 29 on July 31, 2011. That’s old. Not back-pain, dentures, and porridge old, but old enough to feel like something should have happened by now.

I understand, on an intellectual level, that it’s not reasonable to expect to have achieved or earned or even been given a whole fuck of a lot before the age of 30. We do, after all, live in an age of lowered expectations, eliminated expectations for the unlucky. This latter group of unfortunate souls – everyone who’s more than 5 years younger than I am – is completely fucked. My generation is at a low cruising altitude with little hope of advancement; they’re trapped in a pond at the end of the runway. Those poor kids.

Lots of those poor kids have never voted. They’ll head out to the polls in 2012, much like I did in 2000, as voting virgins. Maybe they’ll be excited, but if they’re sensible they won’t be. After all, who are they going to vote for? The first vote I cast was for Al Gore in an election that wound up being decided by the US Supreme Court. That was enough to put me off of the electoral process, but it’s nothing compared to what kids are now confronting. Their generation is disposable, because their generation is poor; they don’t have money now, and they won’t have money in the future, because no one’s hiring them. Those crappy, entry-level, no-status jobs are going to people my age, people with more experience and more education. I’d feel guilty, but to survive in the American economy, you have to look out for number 1. If you don’t have money, you don’t have a voice. Democracy, it turns out, is not really compatible with capitalism. Neither is peace. Neither is prosperity.

People my age will return to the polls as voting veterans. Most of us will probably go Democrat, for the sole reason that they seem fractionally less bent on destroying the universe. Not much, but a little. We’ll vote for them because they’re less assiduous in their distaste for same-sex marriage, because they oppose some of the right’s more manifestly psychotic positions. Not, you’ll note, because we think they’ll really do a whole lot to make our lives better; we’re at that stage where our votes are cast with the simple hope of maybe getting by. That’s it. I expect that the sun will have set on the US empire before I hit 30. I expect to live hand-to-mouth until I drop dead. I expect I won’t ever retire. I expect that one day my medical bills will become overwhelming. I expect not to starve, but who can say? Expectations suitably lowered. Happy birthday to me.