Tuesday, October 28, 2008

Generational Shift.

Someone sent me the youtube video of Generation We, an inspirational take on the next generation coming up. I want to help them attain their dreams in a way that my early boomer parents wouldn't or couldn't help me. Then I realized...

I'm generally a Gen Xer and more specifically I'm a Baby Buster. I am of that generation of people born between 1965 and 1979 who are not going to be as financially successful or secure as their parents. I am of that generation where little was expected of us, so little was asked of us. I wanted to know if my generation was even being talked about online, or electorally, or *anything* to prove that we do exist.

"If Nevermind changed the world, the world changed back pretty fast," was the quote I found in the linked article, and it certainly feels true.

Sandwiched between 80 million baby boomers and 78 million millennials, Generation X... has just 46 million members, making it a dark-horse demographic "condemned by numbers alone to nicheville,"

Something about my generation twigged my memory. The other day I was invited to join the "I support Dominic LeBlanc for the Liberal leadership" group on Facebook. I declined, because I wasn't sure that Mssr. LeBlanc had the electoral experience or perhaps was too young to lead the party. The Gen-We vid led me to the Gen-X Time article which led me to Dominic LeBlanc's wiki page!

Born: December 14, 1967 (he's only four months older than my husband)

First elected to the House of Commons: November 27, 2000 (he was almost 33 years old) and he has faced re-election 3 times since then. I thought he won for the first time in 2006.

I've met him. He was smart, engaging, and was willing to look at issues that might not capture the public's fancy, but were meaningful. He was good enough to spend some time talking with Joe about Iraq, stop-loss and the Democratic primaries.

Now that he's announced that he's going to run for the leadership, and I've had a little time for reflection, I think that I will support him. He is the first person of my cohort with a legitimate chance of being the leader of the Liberal Party of Canada.

It was this quote that all is not business as usual in the LeBlanc camp.

"I think Liberals want to see the party reposition itself as very much the voice of middle-class Canadians and occupy a pragmatic and centrist position," he said. "Perhaps, in recent campaigns we have drifted from that pragmatic centre of Canadian politics and we haven't given some of the traditional Liberal voting blocks an enthusiastic reason to support us."


Pragmatic and centrist. Though many may disagree with me, that's the kind of position that I'd like to see the party take. The environment should be an economic platform and not a "leftist" issue.