People Born After 1997—Are They Just Better?
Early on Wednesday morning, while I was scrolling through Twitter in order to learn the midterm-election results in the most piecemeal and confusing fashion possible, I noticed something a little off.
On the lists of “” and “,” which logically included such victories as those of Massachusetts’s Maura Healey and Oregon’s Tina Kotek, the first openly lesbian governors to be elected, and that of Wes Moore, Maryland’s first Black governor, journalists were also citing the win by Florida’s 25-year-old Maxwell Alejandro Frost, the first member of Gen Z elected to Congress. These firsts are inarguably all firsts, but they’re “historic” in different ways. In the former cases, refers to the historical context that makes the win notable—a context of longtime oppression or marginalization or underrepresentation. In Frost’s case, although he is being used more literally, to refer to the passage of time. A few years ago, members of Gen Z—people who now range in age from roughly 10 to 25—were too young to be elected to office. Now some of them are old enough. So the barrier being broken is, in fact, not being broken, because it is impossible to break; time marches on, always, no matter what. People get older.
