Greetings from the Motor City, where I am spending the summer working with candidates running in August primary elections.

In the summer of 2000, I was 24, a year out of college and working as a supervisor for a marketing company in suburban Washington, DC. I had left St. Louis the previous summer and was living on my own (well, with my fiancée) for the first time. Life was just revving up for me.

The company I worked for hired a lot of college kids during the summer. These “kids” were anywhere from 2-6 years younger than me…a gap that doesn’t seem like much of one. Oh how naive I was…

One day, I was talking with a few of them about music…a subject that many know is near and dear to my heart. We were talking about hip-hop…it may have been about current acts at that time. I wasn’t particularly fond of a lot of them, and I mentioned that I was a big fan of Public Enemy. Public Enemy was no longer one of the biggest acts out there, but they had released a well-received album only 2 years prior.

One of the guys I was talking to immediately laughed at me. He said, “Public Enemy?! That’s old music!”

And it was that day, in the summer of 2000 at age 24, that I felt “old” for the very first time…