Generations@Work

It’s a bright sunny Saturday morning.  A normal wintry chill has replaced the searing cold of the past few days.  Just 40 miles north of here, every political pundit and political junkie, along with thousands of campaign volunteers, are moving briskly over the crusty but substantial snow cover of New Hampshire trying to figure out what will happen next in this campaign season.

Truth.  It’s already happened. The era of Boomer politics is over.  A new generation is rising, urged on by a new voice.  Personally, I feel almost giddy with delight.  Those with an instinct for metaphysics can now debate: is the Voice, the masterfully eloquent voice of Barack Obama, so compelling, so inspiring, so not-just-from-the-world-of-politics but from a world that merges spirit, mind, and body into an alchemical fountain of positive transformative energy, a voice that acts on the young as a political siren song from which they cannot escape, and thus they come?  Or is Mr Obama tapping into an energy that has already been rising, thus making him one beneficiary of something that has already been evident but is only now moving beyond the realms of culture and consumption?

Obama and the Millennial Generation are like two powerful, mutually attractive energy fields that draw each other inwards, creating something new and powerfully transformative.  When the hinge of history moves, it sometimes moves swiftly.

So many now seem perplexed and bemused by it all.  But when Barack Obama becomes President Obama one year from now, it will mark not just an extraordinary moment in the history of our nation, but an epoch-shifting generational moment.  The Boomer candidates, and the one Silent generation candidate in the Democratic field, Joe Biden, made a critical miscalculation.  The candidates and their handlers assumed that the pattern of political participation on the part of young people would hold true to the historical pattern of apathy and non-participation.  These Boomers were making the same fatal assumptions about Millennials that so many business leaders have been making for the past several years.  Ah, they’re just kids, what do they know?  The Boomer arrogance, an arrogance fed by moral as well as egoist certitude, has been the achilles heel of this generation since its rise to power in the early 1990’s.  The arrogance of the Clintons has perhaps not been so clumsy and costly as the arrogance of George W. Bush, but it is fed by the same river.

Am I getting carried away with my own giddiness over the prospect of being able to listen Presidnent Obama’s innaugural address?  Will I be watching on Tuesday night as the Boomers regroup and reclaim power?  Perhaps.  But as one who has been following the rise of the Millennial generation, I am now more convinced than ever that we are witnessing the passing of the torch and that even a temporary glitch like a less-than-stellar showing in New Hampshire on Tuesday will not derail the Obama express.

We can no longer refer to the Millennials as “rising”.  They rose on Thursday night and they are not going to fade.  They will sweep Mr Obama into the White House.  And in record time they will find a way to gain more power in the last domain where there presence is still seems perplexing.  While the Boomer political pundits sat in bars in Des Moines talkng with each other, the Millennials stole the show.  And while Boomer business consultants advise their Boomer colleagues who run America how to “manage” the Millennials - the business equivalents to those Des Moines barflys - the Millennials will soon find a way to run our economy.

Another reason for me to feel giddy.

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 5th, 2008 at 9:37 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.