Why both the Progressives and Conservatives will fail

I was sitting in a Continental Breakfast in Mackinaw City and looking around.

I counted forty diners.

Assuming an 80 year lifespan (to make the math easy) one would expect an even distribution with one example from every two-year age silo.  Of course, random noise means that they will clump.  Some silos will be over represented and some will have zero.

What I saw was about ten kids under age 12.  Nobody from age 12-to-30.  The a few parents.  Then grandparents filling out the remainder.

Having raised teenagers and young adults I can attest that teenagers and young adults have their own culture(s) and are slippery.  They reject most of what they hear and are internally referenced to their peer group.

12-through-30-year-olds are convinced that they are the dominant culture.  They fail to understand that dominant market is not identically the same as dominant culture and may be in for a rude awakening if trade wars dampen the global flow of money (which benefits the US) and increases the prices of the foreign-made gadgets that define their lives.

They are a very fickle group.  The internet is the metronome of their life.  They are used to a new smart phone every 18 months and a new social platform every three years.

Like somebody once said, "Getting hold them to a commitment out of them is like trying to nail warm jello to a wall."

It is difficult to imagine "Progressive" and "Conservative" sticking to them because most of them never held to any single -ism for more than three or four years.

Foreigners
About 1-in-4 visitors to the Island are foreign or recent American immigrants.  They are working at assimilating.  It is not uncommon to hear Mandrin, Hindi, Italian, Russian and Spanish conversations all talking over each other.

I am tickled to see that for a couple of reasons.  I love having outside money coming to Michigan.  Another reason is that they are validating the enduring, inherent value of Americana.

---Added later---
Belladonna got up later and guess what...there were teenagers at the Continental Breakfast an hour before it shut down.

Egg-on-face.  They were here all along.  They were sleeping.