There is something glorious—something profoundly right—about the rising of a new generation in politics.

The election of Zohran Mamdani as mayor of New York City made me unaccountably happy. Not the specifics of his agenda, necessarily; I’m not a New Yorker and so I don’t have a feel for the challenges the city faces and the possible solutions to them. But Mamdani now has a clear mandate to engage in the kind of optimistic, can-do policy experimentation that was once a hallmark of American self-governance. It is that spirit that won the day in New York City. It is that spirit that makes me happy, and not just for New York City, but for our country as well.

I’m a Baby Boomer, and I think it’s way past time that my generation ceded power, not least because we screwed up so badly. There is a great deal of justified anger at Boomers right now—but there’s nothing unusual about that. (Read Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians, a scathing takedown of his elders; or go watch The Graduate again.) Every generation screws up; that’s just the way of things.

No, it’s something deeper than blunders or the hopeless unhipness of the old that’s driving politics and culture in societies during moments like this one. It’s the human demand for energy and optimism. By the time they reach their 60s and 70s and beyond (if they are so fortunate), the outlook of most older people is shaped by their disappointments and failures as much as by their successes and joys. That’s OK, too; there’s wisdom in it. But the wisdom is too often laced with caution, prejudice, fear and spiritual desiccation. Those are not good building materials.

So the rise of the young not is not just a change in leadership; it is a renewal of civic imagination. Every few decades, the wheel turns and the young seize the moment, bringing with them not just energy, not just idealism, but also a kind of moral audacity: Who says we can’t try something new? Why are we stuck with these stale compromises and inherited hypocrisies? This old order isn’t working. Remember? Of course you do—Bob Dylan:

Come senators, congressmenPlease heed the callDon’t stand in the doorwayDon’t block up the hallFor he that gets hurtWill be he who has stalledThe battle outside ragin’Will soon shake your windowsAnd rattle your wallsFor the times they are a-changin’

Come mothers and fathersThroughout the landAnd don’t criticizeWhat you can’t understandYour sons and your daughtersAre beyond your commandYour old road is rapidly agin’Please get out of the new oneIf you can’t lend your handFor the times they are a-changin’

This is how democracy keeps its pulse strong. When youth steps forward, it reminds the rest of us that history is not finished, that the story of justice, equality, and hope must be rewritten anew by those who have the courage to dream differently and act decisively.

“Youth will be served,” the old saying goes, and it must be, if a society wishes to live rather than merely persist. The young naturally possess that astonishing human capacity: faith that tomorrow can be more fair, more humane, more beautiful than today.

In the election of Zohran Mamdani—and in the rise of a new generation of leaders across the political spectrum and through all the fields of social endeavor—we are witnessing not the rejection of experience but the reclamation of possibility. Democracy renews itself in the faces of the young.

That promise of renewal is at the heart of our poem this week. It’s by the American poet Mary Oliver, and, like so much of her work, it speaks for itself:

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Every morningthe worldis created.Under the orange

sticks of the sunthe heapedashes of the nightturn into leaves again

and fasten themselves to the high branches–and the ponds appearlike black clothon which are painted islands

of summer lilies.If it is your natureto be happyyou will swim away along the soft trails

for hours, your imaginationalighting everywhere.And if your spiritcarries within it

the thornthat is heavier than lead–if it’s all you can doto keep on trudging–

there is stillsomewhere deep within youa beast shouting that the earthis exactly what it wanted–

each pond with its blazing liliesis a prayer heard and answeredlavishly,every morning,

whether or notyou have ever dared to be happy,whether or notyou have ever dared to pray.