2018 Person of the Year: The Millennials

My choice for the 2018 person of the year is the Millennial generation. In 2018, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez became the youngest woman ever elected to congress, giving the Millennials a voice in our government. Also, it was mainly due to the massive Millennial voter turnout that so many seats were switched from Red to Blue in the 2018 Midterms, which is a very clear statement by voters that the people of the United States want Trump to be held in check. The Millennials aren’t just going after Republicans however, Ocasio-Cortez and others are also pressuring the Democrats to be more progressive and to stop contributing to the exploitation of young people as an easy revenue source when it comes to things like school loans and health care. Finally, Millennials represent the majority of our active duty military, so the repeated media trouncing of the whole generation is highly hypocritical and disrespectful.

I can understand the Millennials and Ocasio-Cortez not winning the person of the year award from institutions such as Time Magazine, but I think it’s criminal that she wasn’t even discussed as a legitimate candidate. We live in an era where the media constantly, and rightly, demands greater equality for women. When these same institutions go quiet when a woman makes history as the youngest ever elected to the House of Representatives, it’s important to emphasize the hypocrisy. When names like Meghan Markle, who accomplished considerably less than Ocasio-Cortez, are thrown around as legitimate candidates, and Ocasio-Cortez does not even get a whisper, you know that the fix is in.

Awards like, ‘Person of the Year’ are only conceived to generate controversy and discussion, and for an institution like ‘Time’ to nominate ‘The Millennials’ certainly would have done that. Like Generation X before them, the Millennials seem to be the exception for the oft-repeated maxims of how evil it is to bully people online. The same individuals who write self-righteous diatribes on the inappropriateness of songs like ‘Baby It’s Cold Outside,’ will not hesitate to jump on Facebook and share the latest Millennial bashing meme.

But Millennials do not deserve this treatment and have only been subject to it because they’ve been too young to be appointed editors of major magazines or newspapers, they’ve not been elected to seats of government…until now.

Time eventually settled on “The Guardians” as their person of the year, which is a not so veiled swipe at Trump who constantly says the news is fake. However, I’m not sure that journalists have earned the right to be celebrated. The fact is, Trump is President because the media failed to dig up news of his various affairs, or the much rumored tape of him dropping a racial slur, or any other of a dozen possible accusations that might have subjected him to criminal investigation prior to winning the most powerful office in the world. Instead of doing real journalism during the Trump campaign, they chortled at the ratings they got by covering him, failing to make the connection that all the free publicity was playing right into a Trump win.

Keep in mind, too, that although Trump’s efforts to discredit the media are appalling, the media is increasingly being run by a smaller and smaller number of major corporations. The era of independent discourse that keeps major institutions in check is largely over, and this is not something that should be celebrated. There is a big money narrative that is being forced on the people, and people like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are fighting it.

I always find it bizarre how some of my friends can lament the cost of health care or schooling for their kids, but then they turn around and scoff at people like Ocasio-Cortez, or Bernie Sanders. These are the only two political voices that seem to care at all about everyday people, and somehow the big money narrative of the shadow figures that run the world has the masses convinced they should be ignored. Even Obama, for whom I have great respect, failed to endorse Ocasio-Cortez during the “must win” 2018 midterms. Ocasio-Cortez does not fit into the Democratic brain trust that needs a major kick in the pants before it starts representing the American people again. The number one thing that should be worrying the voting public is that the Democrats will again try to coast along on perceived hatred of Trump and push forth their agenda rather than follow the will of the people. We’ve seen it play out before, failing to listen to the people will result in another Trump win.

More money is currently being spent to discredit Alexadria Ocasio-Cortez than anybody else. You see her disparaged everywhere from media stories to memes. The attacks are unfair and nonsensical and fit into the category of Goebbels’s “big lie told often enough that people begin to accept it as true.” The media and the ‘Guardians of the Truth’ need to recognize when such a campaign is underway and use the weapons at their disposal to oppose it. Time could have done a lot of good for the future of the United States by legitimizing Ocasio-Cortez with a Person of the Year win.

But as George Carlin says, there are players in a big game and you don’t have a seat at the table—they care nothing about you. Despite the powerlessness of the people who actually make America work, the Ocasio-Cortez win and her refusal to back down from high profile, big money politicians is the one thing that has brought hope for the future in 2018. The Millennials are the key to all of this. They haven’t been around long enough to be responsible for the mess the world is in, guilt for those atrocities belongs to all the generations that have come before. The Millennials now have a seat at the table, and they’re using their voice to demand we start cleaning up the mess.