2014: A Political Coming-of-Age?

I feel like I woke up today and was, all of a sudden, a political being.

Honestly, I would probably buy an abortion Barbie. It’s about time Barbie did something political. Image from Breitbart.com

I was disappointed by the Texas gubernatorial race. It has no effect on me whatsoever, but I was sad to see the way the campaigning went and that Greg Abbott beat her out 59-39 (if we’re rounding to whole numbers). Was I surprised?

No. Not in the least. But I like Wendy Davis and that’s enough for the results to bother me, even if they were expected.

I was disappointed by the Indiana races. Watching my county and neighboring counties lean Republican. Again, this is not surprising all things considered: there are a lot of white, conservative individuals in my area. But these are candidates who I disagree with, who I’ve been stuck with before thanks to redistricting, and who now I tried to vote out of office and I’m still stuck with them.

In general, the election is disheartening for a young, progressive woman who is politically aware, which I think is part of the reason I woke this morning to both sad election results and a new-found (maybe?) sense of politicalness.

Of course, I have always been political, partially because my family has always been political. My parents encouraged this in my brother and me by not sheltering us from adult conversation and instead asking us to form our own ideas and opinions about the world around us. And while my pro-union, democratic leaning parents are certainly part of why I’m a progressive individual, they aren’t the be-all-end-all. Because we have disagreed on things, and I have watched my parents come around to different perspectives in the last ten years or so.

And it’s because of this background that I’m deeply disappointed in Millennials for being, stereotypically, a-political. I have many friends who I can say with a reasonable degree of certainty did not turn out to vote yesterday, and who likely could not even name one political candidate from our midterm elections. So it was with this perspective–that many of my peers don’t give a damn–that I found myself reading Erin Gloria Ryan’s “Election 2014 Postmortem: We Fucking Did This To Ourselves” over on Jezebel this afternoon. Ouch.