We’re wrapping it up over at 99problems but this story caught our eye:

Do not adjust your monitor, that is in fact a judge, shuffling a deck of cards,  flanked by two nervous/excited Arizonans.  Oh, the shoddy camera work; mic in the shot! But seriously…that card shuffle sounds good, right?

Don’t wonder what a deck of cards has to do with the American legal system; about as little as you expect.  That whole ‘checks & balances’ dealy doesn’t leave a lot of room for Lady Luck most of the time, but every now and then your legal compass leads you to the end of a heated city council race in Cave Creek, Arizona, and you really don’t have any other choice.

Well, not true.  You could play dice.

The story in and of itself is just a vignette, nothing to think hard about.  What originally piqued my interest was that guy on the right, the serious looking dude in black (Adam Trenk).   I was looking at the picture — you know, tryin’ to count the cards and all — when I noticed that Trenk was really young…and looked like a hipster.

Man! I thought. Everywhere you look lately there’s another 25 year old council member, mayor, state rep or high school principal. Good or bad, ready or not, a new generation of politicians are pushing their way into the public forum.

We are that generation, and we are hustlers:

Mr. Trenk, who considered himself a fresh face in politics, wanted the seat badly enough to spend $17,000 on his campaign, unheard of in races here that normally require candidates to shelve out several hundred dollars for a bunch of fliers. -nytimes

$17,000?  That’s Millennial money, progressive philanthropists and children-are-the-future kind of money.  Now, maybe it’s self made, or inherited; according to the NYTimes, Trenk is ” a law student and newcomer to town.”

However mysteriously he arrived, looks like he’ll be staying a while; in the final moment of reckoning, he drew the king of hearts, while his opponent, Thomas McGuire, picked a six. Life ain’t fair. The older I get, the more I know it. You can keep your head down or try to stay up, sit at home all alone or criss cross earth’s circumference…one way or another, we each pick our moment to engage with the wider world.  Many people go a life time, living privately; but we are Generation Y as in Why Not Me.   Our President and our peers encourage us to engage, and many of us are going at it with gusto.

Trenk invokes our youth driven political mandate with a quote from Obama’s trip to Europe on the bio page of his website, adamtrenk.com:

“Young people are unburdened by the biases or prejudices of the past. That is a great privilege of youth, but it is also a tremendous responsibility because it is you who must ultimately decide what we do with this incredible moment in history. We have just emerged from an era marked by irresponsibility, and it would be easy to choose the path of selfishness or apathy, of blame or division. But that is a danger that we cannot afford. The challenges are too great. It is a revolutionary world that we live in, and history shows us that we can do improbable, sometimes impossible things… We must not give up on one another. In a new century we must hold firm to our common values, hold firm to our faith in one another. Together I am confident that we can achieve the promise of a new day.”

A few hours after the show down, Trenk cast his first vote of office, re: whether to change the town’s general plan so as to allow WalMart to open one of its cultural blackholes superstores in the area.

Final count? 6 to 1, Trenk the loan dissenter.