The one thing Baby Boomer Hillary Clinton supporters have in common…

With very few exceptions, this is what I notice about my friends who support Hillary Clinton:

You’re doing OK.

I am not.

I am:

A farmer who lost a third of our drought-ridden walnut crop during a freak windstorm last summer. This weather system is common in Mexico at this time of year, but not California. “Los ciclones” broke hundreds of branches and shook a huge portion of our crop loose months before harvest. Climate change is my current reality.

I am:

Looking down the barrel of crushing federal student loan debt that even with my Income Based Repayment plan threatens to bankrupt me the minute the debt is released and the interest is counted as taxable income.

I am:

Struggling with over a decade of chronic pain which is just debilitating enough to keep me from working hard enough to make ends meet, but not enough to qualify for disability. The awesome Obamacare plan that I signed up for and benefited from for a year was just converted back to the shitty, high deductible plan I had pre-AHA. So no more regular medical care for me!

I:

Couldn’t borrow money to refinance my debt if I wanted to. Even when I had good credit, the fact that I came of borrowing age after the housing market meltdown means that my credit limits were tiny, my credit history was too short, and my interest rates so, so much higher than yours.

I am:

A small business owner who can’t afford to grow my business because my bankrupt state continues to shift the burden of default onto small businesses. More employees = business-killing overhead.

Do you want to know something sad? My retirement plan is to thank my lucky stars that I have so few siblings and cousins to split an eventual inheritance with, because a 401K is not only outside of my realm of possibility but also a terrible gamble after Bill Clinton did away with the New Deal banking reform that prevented investment banks from gambling with retirement savings.

Something tells me this is not your reality.

You’re doing fine. Your retirement, financed in part by the social security I am paying into but certainly don’t expect to ever draw on, has kicked in. You might be in debt but you have assets. You probably own a house or two. You certainly don’t have tens of thousands of dollars in un-refinanceable debt that you acquired for a useless bachelor’s degree. How much did your bachelor’s degree cost, by the way?

Here’s another thing- you probably have kids and grandkids. You have a really powerful need to believe, based on your love for them and your biological imperative, that they are not going to struggle. This is a cognitive bias known as ostriching. Your psyche cannot bear to actually believe that things are very bad and going to get worse within their lifetime.

You don’t want to believe your progeny will struggle until the day they die.

But I already am. We already are.

We are the first generation in America to do worse than you. We are reaping what you sowed, and the harvest is meager.

You know that movie device where the blast doors are shutting and the protagonist manages to squeeze through right before he is crushed to death and all those poor schmucks on the other side are wailing and pounding on the door? Guess who is who in this scenario.

Putting your mouth against the 6 inch steel and shouting, “Incremental progress is the answer! Look how far we’ve come!” isn’t helping my attitude because my reality and my future is so much more dire than yours. You squeaked through to a level of safety (for now) that I can’t relate to because I am not on the same side of the doors as you.

I am experiencing the fallout of deregulation financially and physically NOW. My future is terrifying. Even if I turn my personal economics around, which I strive ceaselessly to do, the heating of the planet, driven by oil interests, is already ruining my livelihood and future.

You have benefited from the artificial bloom of prosperity created by the oil-based first world economy. Much like tilling the soil temporarily boosts production by giving soil microbes a mega dose of oxygen, you have benefited from an artificial and ultimately unsustainable production boom made possible by oil.

You didn’t work, study, or save harder than me. You had the good luck to be born when financial regulation, cheap education, free-flowing credit lines (especially when you were young and getting on your feet) and American prosperity all served to give you a leg up during a crucial developmental time in your young adult life.

Your generation gobbled up resources that were made abundantly available to you. That doesn’t make you bad or selfish or evil or short-sighted. It makes you human. I would have done the same.

You are the survivors living on tiny islands of stability, looking at us floundering millions and saying, “Well, I’m on dry land and I have a boat in case things change.” Your position doesn’t change the fact that I’m drowning.

Your experience with incremental progress has been largely positive.

Mine has been a disaster.

So the next time you want to lecture me on pragmatics and lesser-of-two-evils Centrism, think about how I and the growing majority of young Americans really live and all the “incremental progress” that has us preparing for a lifetime of debt, illness, and downward mobility.

You are speaking from a place of privilege that you enjoy largely because I do not.

I am out of time. We are out of time. One way or the other, the change must be radical. Not for you.

For us.