What do you think? Crisis of hope and the Baby Boomers

I was in a discussion with some friends recently--drunk on Obama hope friends. Hope-bama addicts.

One of my friends mentioned that her mom said that Obama's election has "given her her future back." My friend's mother, a Baby Boomer, felt that during her youth the hope and passion she experienced at that time were due to iconic political figures like the Kennedys and the world events of that time. She said that the assasination of the Kennedys ripped her future from her.

The discussion went on about this hope that the President-Elect has inspired. It went on about the action it has inspired. It was a passionate discussion, but someone said, "what if somone takes this away from us." They wondered what would happen if Obama came to some ill fate at the hands of some extremist or racist. I said, what if someone else has nothing to do with it? What if Obama himself lets "us" down? What if nothing changes?

How long before hope evaporates? What will the reaction be of so many of my friends who are a new generation who have bought into this "hope" hook, line, and sinker? What of the old generation who may have found new hope in the President-Elect?

Baby Boomers face a time when they are wanting to retire from a workforce that seems to be faling apart around them. Their retirement savings may have dried up in the recennt financial crisis. They may have children facing foreclosure or be facing foreclosure themselves. They may have renewed hope--albeit based on one anecdotal incident--in a system that will eventually let them down.

When the let-down comes, generations of the working class will be spurned. We can work toward creating an understanding of a true alternative in this time so that those spurned generations may finally think outside the capitalist system and create a party and a society where the working person has a snowball's hope of survival.