I have a vivid memory from my sophomore year of high school in an intense discussion of California’s Proposition 8 with one of my best friends. We yelled back and forth over whether or not religion should play a role in defining legal marriage. Our conversations were always futile, for no matter how much we discussed, we were already set. I was a Democrat, she was a Republican. That difference determined how we thought on these issues, and that was never going to change.
This political division carried throughout the rest of high school, through mock debates in government class, op-ed assignments for newspaper and the excitement of the 2012 election. My peers and I navigated along a political dividing line, and though we were always respectful of beliefs different than our own, we remained deeply rooted in our household party preferences.
My college education at UC Santa Barbara shaped me into a fierce progressive. I learned about all these problems in the United States that were so systemic and desperately wanted radical change that never seemed to happen. For millennials, our political era has been characterized by intense congressional gridlock to the point that politics seems to be more about blocking the actions of the other party rather than creating a better society.