In the final Presidential Debate of a campaign that has gone on longer than the life spans of most high-quality network television shows, I found myself shocked for the first time in a while. I have been a Barack Obama supporter from the start, even when I lived on the West Coast and most of my fellow Californians assumed the sun would rise and set, and Hillary Clinton would be our next President. So imagine my shock when amidst an evening where a Mister Clean-doppelganger became John McCain’s new Ronald Reagan, that I found myself in full agreement with the Senator from Arizona.

After almost a full hour of rehearsed lines and poorly veiled condescension, Obama explained why Joe-The-You-Know-What may have to pay more taxes if he operated a business which earned enough revenue to compensate him with $250,000. Seeing a moment where the socially awkward septuagenarian could fain a bond with a public who was steadily becoming more uncomfortable even contemplating what might constitute a McCain Presidential Doctrine, he looked into the camera, grinned, and said, “Congratulations, Joe. You’re rich.”

For a brief moment, it seemed as though McCain was talking to me. It was like a one-man show when the audience realizes they are the ex-lover, the mother, or whoever else is in the room with the performer. I understood that I was in John McCain’s production of Mister Smith Goes to Washington, except Mister Smith was an anti-hero and Washington was studio apartment in Roger’s Park.

But then he laughed. The scene was over and like a high school drama student, he laughed at the idea that $250,000 a year was somehow not a great deal of money. But what I found more disappointing was that in the middle of an economic crisis that everyone from Nobel Laureates to Barber Shop Lincoln-Douglas debaters have labeled as the worst financial event sense the Great Depression, no one in print, radio, or televised media has mention the fact that if JTP does bring home $250,000 annually, he is indeed financially rich.

The issue is a battle on many cultural and economic fronts. As a writer, I feel the battle over “Richness” is best waged on the field of language. Webster.com defines ‘rich’ as, “Having abundant possessions and especially material wealth.” It goes on to give additional definitions for quality and color, but the first definition is at the heart of the problem with American’s views on economy.

Our culture is built on consumption, most notably proven after 9/11 when the person currently occupying our highest elected office told us to go and shop as though a new washer/dryer combo or plasma TV would bring back the thousands of dead or dying. My generation, which was born when the seeds of the current economic fallout were freshly planted, had grown up with the idea that being an American meant constantly consuming. Our cheap Playmates’ Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles…well, are cheap, so Mom goes an gets another and another and the matching bomb-dropping blimp, and the pizza shooting tank, and the NES to play the game on, and etcetera and etcetera. To paraphrase a common saying, our only tool is a dollar, so every problem looks like a sale.

As art and life are known to flatter each other, we have taken to celebrate being rich in popular culture not as the end of a journey of struggle and work, but simply as a state of being. Then we do our best to imitate this imitation. I have never understood the lore or either Sex in the City or Entourage. In fact, I have found it mildly terrifying that I am part of a generation that would actively observe others doing nothing but constantly consuming or finding other ways to consume. But my peers are not only entertained by this pointless obsession with materialism, they lift these figures up as relatable oracles, asking themselves in everyday situations, “What would Carrie do?”

My hope for the future lies in the fear of what is assured to come. This is only the beginning. There is no “Magic Bullet” bailout package that is ever going to fix overnight what the generations of consumption has done; at least, not a moral one. Our relatively early success in the brief existence of this nation was bought on the backs of terrorized natives, kidnapped slaves, and exploited immigrants. Even our economic dominance in the twentieth century is tied directly to wars and the creation of the military industrial complex and my generation (and at least the following two generations) is going to have to drastically change our concept of “rich.”

To put it bluntly, what our parents and grandparents considered the “American Dream” is about to become significantly less attainable for more Americans. Fewer of us will travel the world, or at least less regularly. Home ownership is not going to be base of our retirement plan (which probably should have happened in the late 1990’s.) Yet, when I tried to express this to a friend and peer recently, they sneered and asked, “So do you expect us to live in mud huts, or something?”

There it is, my fellow Millennials. The issue at hand: Will we be able to stop equating our dominance with ownership?

Unlike our grandparents who experienced the effects of the Great Depression, or our parents who faced and absorbed the effects of the draft, the Civil Rights/Black Power Movement, the Feminist Movement, and at least one major energy crisis, we lack a varied picture of wealth and access. Wealth and access were the terms John McCain was striving to describe, and Joe has a great deal of both. But the fact that few have addressed the great difference between cutting consumption, and Scrooge-McDuck-wealthy, tells me that we are astonishingly unprepared for what we are about to go through.

This is, of course, with the belief that my fellow citizens are also unprepared to turn back the clock of social justice we have strived to uphold. Right? Might we be willing to give less food aid and protection to countries that truly know poverty — another term that is rarely discussed but heavily experienced here and abroad. Are we going to maintain our habit of defining ourselves by the size of our IPhones and the bags under our shoulders? Or are we going to do what those who came before us could not; learn to say that enough – or more accurately, the abundance (the wealth and the access) that I already have – is enough?