I'm Mad as Hell (Again)

I'm posting my open letter to the NY Times. A bit sloppy, but I was in a hurry.

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Regarding Matt Bai's assessment of Dean's legacy:

When you say "Dr. Dean can hardly claim to have laid the rails for some powerful engine of change," you've got a huge blind spot.

No one in my lifetime has ever inspired my generation to mobilize politically -- until Dean. No one has ever addressed the needs of my contemporaries with such clarity and resolve.

I'm 32 and college-educated and, unlike many of my friends, steadily employed. We have lost our jobs -- in programming, publishing, design -- or sometimes graduate with advanced degrees, only not to be able to find a job in the first place. Most of us won't have the option of one parent staying home to raise the children, as many of our parents did. Many of us have no healthcare, or have a package which barely meets one's basic needs. On a "good" plan, I'm still spending close to $100 a month on prescriptions alone.

(And we wonder why we get so much spam advertising prescription drugs?)

So when someone like Dean, with a clear track record of making strides in health care, among other things, comes along, I'm getting up off my lazy Gen-X ass and giving him some cash.

It's too bad Dean was so vocal about wanting to break up the media conglomerates. If he hadn't been, maybe they wouldn't have skewered him with such abject glee.

Either way, I'm in it for the long haul now. And, together with the thousands, tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands like me, we have the potential to be a powerful engine of change.

Thanks,

Erica Smith