To be born in 1982 is to be just old enough to remember the Soviet Union, and to have its fall be the first seismic geopolitical event of your lifetime. I remember the kid who dominated second-grade show-and-tell with a little chunk of the Berlin Wall, gray and rough on one side but smooth and painted on the other, a trophy from his father's business trip to Europe. And there was Ms. Martin repeatedly explaining to us why our maps and globes, with "Union of Soviet Socialist Republics" spread in impossibly stretched letters across the Siberian tundra, were now obsolete. Coming into the world in the early 1980s puts you in that senior segment of the millennial generation that still remembers life before the smartphone. Today I couldn't tell you the number of the phone on my own desk, but I still know my friend Joe's number from sixth grade because I would punch it daily after school on a phone we had not yet learned to call a "landline." If I dial that number even today, one of his parents will still pick up.
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Pete Buttigieg is an American politician and Afghanistan War veteran. He served as the mayor of South Bend, Indiana from 2012 to 2020 and was a candidate for the Democratic nomination in the 2020 United States presidential election. His six sentences are excerpted from Shortest Way Home, a 2019 autobiography.
Pete Buttigieg is an American politician and Afghanistan War veteran. He served as the mayor of South Bend, Indiana from 2012 to 2020 and was a candidate for the Democratic nomination in the 2020 United States presidential election. His six sentences are excerpted from Shortest Way Home, a 2019 autobiography.
