May 30, 2020

A Modest Proposal

I have just a couple of wee changes to propose.

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I have a constitutional amendment in mind:

Section 1: No person born before 1965 shall be eligible to vote in any federal, state, or municipal election.

Section 2. No person born before 1965 shall be allowed to hold any elective office of the United States or any of the States thereof.

Section 3. That is all.

Sure, I’m joking. Or am I? I don’t really care what else us oldsters do. We should still get our Medicare and our Social Security. We can retire or keep on working. We can take our cruises, or we can sit around watching Fox News and bitching about the kids these days. We can write newspaper columns or compete for Nobel prizes or catch up on Netflix. Whatever. But we no longer get to tell the rest of you what to do.

This is not because I think boomers are responsible for everything bad in the world. We aren’t. But God almighty, I am sick of every last thing turning into yet another replay in our endless battle over the ’60s. Climate change. Pandemics. (Pandemics!) Artificial intelligence. Civil rights. Marijuana. Income inequality. Cold wars. LGBTQ rights. The Oxford comma. Everything. And it won’t end until every last one of us is finally hauled off to the afterlife to continue arguing about it there while Jesus rolls his eyes at us.

Donald Trump is, perhaps, the final, panicked version of this. But it’s not his world anymore. It’s not my world. We boomers will be dead by the time most of these things finally start to irreversibly ruin the country and the planet. It’s time for us to turn things over to the Xers and Millennials and get out of their way.

WE CAME UP SHORT.

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So we urgently need this specific ask, what you're reading right now, to start bringing in more donations than it ever has. The reality, for these next few months and next few years, is that we have to start finding ways to grow our online supporter base in a big way—and we're optimistic we can keep making real headway by being real with you about this.

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WE CAME UP SHORT.

We just wrapped up a shorter-than-normal, urgent-as-ever fundraising drive and we came up about $45,000 short of our $300,000 goal.

That means we're going to have upwards of $350,000, maybe more, to raise in online donations between now and June 30, when our fiscal year ends and we have to get to break-even. And even though there's zero cushion to miss the mark, we won't be all that in your face about our fundraising again until June.

So we urgently need this specific ask, what you're reading right now, to start bringing in more donations than it ever has. The reality, for these next few months and next few years, is that we have to start finding ways to grow our online supporter base in a big way—and we're optimistic we can keep making real headway by being real with you about this.

Because the bottom line: Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism Mother Jones exists to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. We really need to see if we'll be able to raise more with this real estate on a daily basis than we have been, so we're hoping to see a promising start.

payment methods

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