I am a Millennial, just shy of 30 years old. And I supported Hillary in 2008. But like many of my cohort, I’m finding it hard to support her over Bernie.

Here’s the thing: we’re angry. My generation feels like it’s been screwed over.

Imagine you’re a high school sophomore on 9/11/2001. You hadn’t been political before, not really. But now the world just got bigger and scarier. You stay up until dawn, talking on AIM with your equally freaked-out classmates, trying to figure out what’s ahead.

We got the War on Terror, an entirely predictable clusterf***.

You’re a senior now, in 2004, going on a class trip abroad. The kids your age from Europe are horrified when you talk about college - it costs HOW much?! Their governments subsidize education. Yours builds aircraft carriers to bomb civilians half a world away. That, and jails to house the black kids who were stop-and-frisked and caught with a dime bag. You consider trying to pass as Canadian, and wonder how it got to this point.

It’s 2006, and you’re in college. By now you understand. The country is split between Republicans and Democrats. Republicans don’t seem to care about their own interests - they just want to vote for someone who hates blacks, foreigners, queers, sluts, and godless pinko intellectuals as much as they do. You aren’t a white evangelical, so you vote Democrat. They have no reason to care about your interests either, but at least they aren’t actively targeting you to appease their base. Both parties are thus free to represent their real constituents, the rich people who give them money.

To the extent that either party is scared of a demographic, it’s the Boomers. There is periodic talk about how the Boomers are going to bankrupt Social Security and/or the health insurance system. But there’s a whole lot of them, and they vote. So any solution that’s not politically toxic involves kicking the bill to us (and Gen X), and oh yeah, we’ll have to reform the system so that you don’t get the same benefits either. Also, we would rather not think about global warming, so good luck with that too.

A hit song comes out: John Mayer’s “Waiting On The World To Change”. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=REqz9D7OWZE) It perfectly describes how you feel. It’s not that you don’t care, you just know that the fight ain’t fair, so you’re waiting. (Waiting for old Republicans to die, mostly, but what else can you do?)

It’s now 2008, and you’ve graduated. You’re lucky enough to get a good job at the company you worked at during college. But the economy is flying itself into a hillside, and a few months later, the company shuts its doors.

You have no income, not much savings, a pile of debt, and NOBODY is hiring. The cheapest health insurance you can get costs more than your rent. You’re 22 and healthy, so you do without. You cut yourself pretty badly, but you manage to clean the wound and Superglue yourself back together instead of paying for stitches.

In the meantime, Obama has taken office. You’re excited! But the Republican side is in full revolt. Obama, the professor, floats reasonable centrist proposals. The Republicans paint these as pinko Muslim traitor talk, and counter-propose the farthest-right policies they can think of. They gleefully announce that they’re going to bring government to a standstill, and they do.

You’ve crunched the numbers, and you have until May 1 to either get a job or move back home with your parents. On April 30, you get a job offer. It’s menial work, not what you’ve trained for, but it has a paycheck and benefits. You take it. (You’ve changed jobs since then and worked your way up, but you’re still making 60% of what you were in 2008.)

You watch Obama's first State of the Union, and in the midst of a giant ball of platitudes, he mentions that there are different types of Americans. Some of them, people like you, others like your family, neighbors, and friends. From the Republican reaction, you would think he had murdered a bald eagle on live TV. Those people aren't REAL Americans! How dare he! And then you watch this strategy WORK, both at the polls and in terms of moving the window of acceptable discourse.

You've cut Obama some slack. You understand what he's up against. But you're not thrilled about it. Obamacare, sure, it was the best he could do. But nobody forced him to let the banks off with barely a finger-wagging, or give away the store in secret trade negotiations, or continue broken War on Terror policies, or...

Mostly, you feel like nobody with any power is pissed off on behalf of people like you. Nobody, that is, except Bernie Sanders.

Are you still surprised at how many of us are feeling the Bern?

Sec. Clinton is, by a long shot, the most qualified person running. She knows exactly what she’s in for, and would hit the ground running on day 1. But I’m still really struggling to support her. This is why. She was high-up in the administrations of both Pres. Clinton and Obama, and she’s ideologically aligned with them. She thinks we’re mostly on track. People my age tend to disagree.

In one of the debates, Hillary was asked if she knew why young people weren’t supporting her. I really hoped she would speak to some of this. Instead, she dodged the question so fast, it looked like an out-take from The Matrix. Sigh.

Not that I don’t have my concerns with Bernie. I would love for someone to pin him down on what, precisely, he’s going to do when it’s February 2017, he’s president, and he narrowly controls the Senate but not the House. Because that’s a best-case scenario. Obama had a mandate too; that and $2 buys you a coffee. I am too old and cynical for chin-wagging about revolutions. I want politics, and dirty politics at that.