Letter to the Editor of the New York Times by Aliza Wasserman

As a member of Generation Y who has spent my adult life downloading individual songs and listening to them on shuffle, I appreciated Matt Bai’s take on President Obama’s detour from the linear governing style of past presidents as particularly relevant to younger Americans.

I wish Bai had gone a step further in this trajectory, instead of continuing to silo the problems of health care, climate change and economic crisis. While the author views these issues as competing for the attention of the president and the public, the story that is waiting to be told is the one that unites these issues as symptoms of our decades’ long failure to create moderate, forward-thinking systems that are built on concepts of sustainability and prevention. None can be solved on its own; led by the “shuffle” generation, we must take the leap — a paradigm shift toward sustainable, systemic solutions to all of these problems together.

ALIZA R. WASSERMAN
Cambridge, Mass.
July 30, 2009