The Kids These Days Are…In Surprisingly High Spirits

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Republican pollster and language guru Frank Luntz has a new poll out. The bottom line is that young people are pretty damn liberal, which really shouldn’t surprise anyone. But considering the relentless parade of stories about how terrible life is for the kids these days, these three questions might very well surprise some people:

  • Optimistic about their “personal future”: 88 percent
  • Expect to be better off financially than their parents: 75 percent
  • Believe America’s best days are ahead of it: 61 percent

That doesn’t sound like a generation in the throes of existential angst and financial Armageddon. The last few decades—and the most recent one in particular—have been pretty lousy for a lot of people. But millennials haven’t done any worse than anyone else, and in some respects they’ve actually done a little better. Sometimes I wonder if we oldsters are projecting more of our own mopiness on them than they actually feel.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT.

We have a considerable $390,000 gap in our online fundraising budget that we have to close by June 30. There is no wiggle room, we've already cut everything we can, and we urgently need more readers to pitch in—especially from this specific blurb you're reading right now.

We'll also be quite transparent and level-headed with you about this.

In "News Never Pays," our fearless CEO, Monika Bauerlein, connects the dots on several concerning media trends that, taken together, expose the fallacy behind the tragic state of journalism right now: That the marketplace will take care of providing the free and independent press citizens in a democracy need, and the Next New Thing to invest millions in will fix the problem. Bottom line: Journalism that serves the people needs the support of the people. That's the Next New Thing.

And it's what MoJo and our community of readers have been doing for 47 years now.

But staying afloat is harder than ever.

In "This Is Not a Crisis. It's The New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, why this moment is particularly urgent, and how we can best communicate that without screaming OMG PLEASE HELP over and over. We also touch on our history and how our nonprofit model makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there: Letting us go deep, focus on underreported beats, and bring unique perspectives to the day's news.

You're here for reporting like that, not fundraising, but one cannot exist without the other, and it's vitally important that we hit our intimidating $390,000 number in online donations by June 30.

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