The Mayor recently attacked me at a public meeting for being
someone who “does not pay property taxes.” His condescension has been directed
at me and other colleagues many times. As we all know, after all, the Mayor’s
favorite catch phrase is “Because I’m the Mayor and I said so!” With an ego
that big – let’s face it – a little condescension every now and again is to be
expected.
But
since his comments were particularly personal in nature and irrelevant to the
discussion at hand at the time he made them, I feel compelled to make a public
disclosure:
Yes – I
still live at home with my mother. No – I do not own my own home. While the
Mayor seems to think this makes me less of a person, I think it makes me a
prime example of the generation that will soon be taking the reins in society:
in business, in government, in academia. Plus, the Mayor drastically
underestimates the burden of my own personal circumstances. Like so many people
of my generation, I come from a household with divorced parents. Since my
parents’ divorce in 2009 (at the height of the worst economic collapse since
the Great Depression, mind you), I have had to work to earn money to help make
ends meet around the house. My mother and I shared the financial burden that
comes along with trying to put food on the table, keep the lights on and the
water flowing in the house, and planning for the future at a time when things
seemed despairingly uncertain. On top of all this, we had to figure out what on
earth we were going to do when it came time for me to go to college.
Luckily
for me, I was able to manage notable scholastic achievement, and when I
graduated high school in 2011 I got accepted into the Honors program at Central
Connecticut State University. In the program, any student that can complete the
increased rigor of the coursework and still maintain an overall GPA of 3.5 or
higher is privy to a full academic scholarship. I’m truly privileged to say I
was able to do that, and I will graduate from college this upcoming December
without any student loan-debt.
This
privilege has enabled me to continue to work, and use all of the money I earn
to support my family when it’s needed. Working with my mother and now my
brother, we are able to all pool our resources together so that we can keep food on the table, and we can repair our cars, and we can keep the lights on in our home. No,
Mayor, I don’t own a home or pay my own property taxes. But the only reason me
and my family have been able to stay
in our home is because we work with
one another to make ends meet.
The
Mayor seems to think I should be ashamed of that; that my voice and experience
doesn’t matter. But I say to the Mayor and to everyone else – young or old –
that’s ever found themselves in a situation like mine: I’m proud of what I’ve
been able to do to help my family, and I do
know what it’s like to struggle to make ends meet. My voice does matter. Our
voice matters.
Yes, the Mayor thinks that people
who don’t pay property taxes don’t matter. But I think to disregard the voices
of thousands of young up-and-comers in our city simply because they do not yet
pay property taxes is penny-wise and pound-foolish (… then again, that does seem to be the Mayor’s idea of
‘fiscal conservatism’). Young people should be encouraged to exercise their
voice in government. They should be encouraged to be involved! And they do
matter, whether they own homes yet or not.
I just want to say to the Mayor:
you can be as disgusted as you want with what I have to say about the city’s
public policy and the expenditure of taxpayer resources. You can insinuate all
you want that my voice doesn’t matter because to you it appears as though I
don’t yet pay property taxes. But Mayor, I don’t work for you. I work with you.
And I will use my voice for my constituents whether it annoys you or not.
