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I smiled while watching the 116th Congress being sworn in on January 3, 2018 — but I also cried.
The emotions swelled because I’m a recent candidate for local office myself. I know exactly how much work goes into campaigning: Every person being sworn into Congress had endured long days and sleepless nights; they’d knocked on hundreds of doors, called thousands of phones, and written countless postcards. Even more volunteers and activists had done the same in support, hoping it would lead to future victory. And it worked — these lawmakers include the most women, and women of color, of all time, among other firsts.
I smiled watching the Congressional inauguration because I knew it was the end result of a lot of hard work, but I also knew it could not end there. The goal of a campaign isn’t just to elect a worthy candidate, but to elect an official who will enact legislation to better their constituents’ lives. And for the first time in my life, I could distinctly feel that difference. Seeing history-making “firsts” in Congress like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the youngest woman in Congress, take a selfie with Ilhan Omar, one of the first Muslim women in Congress, and Sharice Davids, one of the first Native American women in Congress, in one moment, and then propose progressive legislation in the next, illustrates their true power. These are Congressional representatives who did not come to play. These new representatives aren’t there as diversity figureheads — they are actively working to pass legislation that will create a better country. And they’re doing it with help from the same activists that got them to Washington D.C. in the first place.
For many of my peers, the 2018 midterms were the first real elections we paid attention to, some because this was the first they could vote in, and others because this was their chance to make an impact in a process that had turned out so unexpectedly just two years prior. We are a generation growing up only knowing a radical new way of American politics. We went from a childhood sense of President Barack Obama’s national omnipotence to a more real, adult knowledge of Donald Trump’s presidency.
Many Gen Z’ers haven’t been civically engaged long enough to know what old political rules we should technically abide by. We don’t know that women are supposed to “wait their turn” before running for office. We don’t know that candidates are supposed to be “this old,” “this male,” and “this white” to run. That you have to have political connections to jump into a campaign. We don’t know the Clinton and Bush-era political norms, the Harry Reid-era Congressional etiquettes — we know new rules.
Some people tell us we don’t know enough about politics yet. I simply believe we aren’t jaded yet.
And now, we’ve just witnessed a diverse new group of candidates smash every barrier before them to reach D.C., and watched as new political norms have been established in front of our very eyes. We have the knowledge that a black president is possible. That Muslim women can be in Congress. That women can run for the highest office in the land.
We also know other, uglier rules. We know that an accused sexual assaulter can become president. We know that it’s possible for that same president to install corrupt cabinet members, implement unconstitutional immigration laws, and turn an asylum system upside down. We know it’s possible to manipulate the checks and balances system we were once taught were immutable.
My generation is also well-acquainted with racism, Islamophobia, sexism, homophobia, and transphobia. We taste the bitterness of these oppressions every day, whether it’s walking through city streets at night or driving through our own towns in broad daylight. We live with the ever-present threat of gun violence in our schools. We are acutely aware of the threat climate change presents to our planet. We have DREAMERs in our ranks, unsure of their futures in the only country they’ve ever known.
But we’ve also been granted the tools for activism and connections that no other political generation has had. The student movements of the 1970s didn’t have smartphones or social media. The change we’ve been able to create with these new tools is already apparent in the new conversations being had in the halls of Congress.
For the first time, climate change policy is being treated as an urgent threat. Gun control policy is slated for real discussion and implementation. Rules regarding religious headwear are being changed. Anti-lynching legislation is being passed. Immigration reform is promised. At the same time that we’re watching the ugliest forms of our politics reveal themselves, we’re also seeing the potential for the best.
This is just the beginning. While watching the swearing in of our wonderfully diverse, passionate, and outspoken new Congress, I was smiling for the history that was being made at that moment. But I was crying at the thought of the even more historic changes that are sure to follow if we, as a civically engaged citizenry, continue to maintain our activism on behalf of bold, progressive policies that will help create a better America. We have a new Congress that ran on the pledge to work for greater changes. It’s now up to us to hold them to those promises.
