"Imagine your government as your iPhone," said Lamar Alexander, a Republican Senator from Tennessee, flailing, trying to get anyone under 40 to listen.

Alexander asked us all to imagine this in the GOP's weekly address on Saturday, then immediately cited the need to repeal a bill — the wonderful Dodd-Frank Act, which still feels like an ethereal, beautiful apparition — that is one of the only pieces of paper that stands in the way of the predatory lending practices that enabled friends of the government to post record profits while the American economy collapsed into recession and left tens of thousands homeless because of intentionally vague fine print.

Recently, elected officials read a study about the need to talk to the future, so they found out what the youth own. But the youth do not want to be defined by what they own, because they cannot own much at all. They want to be defined by what they are.

For the last time, this is not about iPhones. This is not about stuff. This is about a generation's inability to get stuff, despite their ability to access more information than ever and, in turn, be smarter than ever, faster than ever before.

This is about a generation that was sold a bill of goods at gunpoint, then they were asked, "Why can't you pay for any of this stuff?"

They never wanted the stuff. They never wanted the loans. They never wanted the cost of college to go up 500 percent since 1985. They never wanted wages to increase 6 percent since 1980. They never wanted to see CEO wages rise 725 percent in the same time period. They never wanted to start earning a median wage at 30, instead of 26, like it was in 1980. They never wanted to work more than any other nation — 408 hours more per person every year than the Dutch, 374 more than the Germans, 59 hours more than the Japanese. They never wanted to work that much and that hard only to be told they weren't working hard enough.

They never wanted to go through this only to be talked down to, only to be told, "Hey, you guys like iPhones? We're just like iPhones!" when, really, the people telling them that — a bought Congress — are buying and selling them, just like the stuff they think Millennials are obsessed with.

They do not care about the stuff. They cannot afford the stuff. And when marketing firms and speechwriters and lobbyists see them hiding on their iPhones, doing things they'd rather caricature than understand, they do not understand that it's not the identity Millennials want. It's the only identity Millennials can afford.

This content is created and maintained by a third party, and imported onto this page to help users provide their email addresses. You may be able to find more information about this and similar content at piano.io