I came of age in the Obama Era.
In an era characterized by the shadow of the Occupy Movement and the emergence of near-universal healthcare; of equal marriage opportunity and the scaling back of No Child Left Behind, the law that defined my early education.
The first election I ever voted in was the one that brought President Obama to a second term. The only White House my nieces and nephews know is one in which the president is a black man, one who plays basketball and watches Game of Thrones; one where the First Lady is oddly reminiscent of the auntie at the barbecue who’s mostly cool but, against our most base instincts, always pushes the green bean casserole on us.
This country, while nowhere near where it needs to be, is considerably better now than it was eight years ago.
Which is why this year, I’m left to hesitantly, but loudly, vote for Hillary Clinton.
Because all of those things aside, millennials are also riding a wave of “not quites”.
The job market is apparently on the upswing, but not quite upswingy enough to guarantee me a job after graduation. And even if I can find a position that I’m qualified for, I’m not quite qualified enough to close the pay gap between my male counterparts and myself.
And then another election cycle came around, and with it came Bernie Sanders.
I heard someone say recently that Sanders rode the Movement to prominence. From Occupy to Black Lives Matter, he wasn’t saying anything that we hadn’t been chanting in the streets or ranting on our Twitter accounts. He was, however, the first politician I ever remember feeling truly heard by. He was talking repealing Citizens’ United, free college for all, closing the pay gap and ensuring all Americans a living wage.
He was a millennial dreamboat politician: all gray hairs and 74 years worth of him.
So we bought his t-shirts, and gave our average donation of 27 dollars per person, and poured ourselves into another grassroots campaign. Into a future we could believe in.
And this week, we watched as the nomination went to Hillary Clinton. She’s a party big-wig, incredibly qualified and respected the world over. She may not have been the choice we wanted, but she’s the one we got (and not a totally bad one at that). But with that acceptance comes the knowledge of something else, that at the end of the day, we’re being forced to accept another “not quite”.
Someone on my Facebook offered this the other night, after images of folks, young and old, weeping at the official nomination of Hillary Clinton (and Bernie’s endorsement) splashed across our TV’s and computer screens:
“Could one of the reasons some of Bernie Sander’s younger supporters seem so devastated be that they’ve grown up in a culture that has not taught them how to lose gracefully? They’ve been taught that everybody wins, everyone gets a trophy, simply for participating and regardless of performance.”
Here’s the deal: we’re a generation of fighters. We’ve fought wars our parents got us into, we’ve fought a system of policing that demonizes our bodies and strips us of our autonomy, and we fight Sallie Mae over the phone every month.
But we’re also a generation of compromise. More than the generation before us, we’ve been left to compromise: our educations, our financial security, our political and social stability due to no fault of our own.
So as The Democratic National Convention comes to an end, I’m left with a unique challenge as a black, female, millennial.
To live in this body is to know that the odds are stacked against you. And to show up, every day, again and again, to dismantle the system anyway.
We show up when we work jobs we don’t love but need because student loans are still very real and we’ve been taught that education and being twice as good is the only way out.
We show up when we see our sisters murdered for vocalizing their contempt for an unjust system by the very people sworn to protect them and chose to keep saying their names anyway. We show up when we march, when we pen editorials and when we rant on our Snapchats.
And this November, I’m going to show up and vote for Hillary Clinton. I’m going to cast my ballot on principle but also on rationality and endorse the best option I have. I’m going to suck it up, and keep working both inside and outside of the system to create a future we can believe in. Because I know what political compromise looks like, but I also know the effect that civil disobedience can have.
Because I’m a millennial –a black millennial- and I know how to fight.