As we all begin to enter our lives as “actual adults” and do things like drive to work, we all begin to realize how the world works. Each generation has its own new problems. Recently in the news we have seen many of these problems come front and center such as sexual assault, terrorism and hate crimes, even many environmental issues in one of the most charged political elections America has seen in some time. While at home I hear phrases that make me cringe whether it is on the television or from one of my parents. Being politically correct isn't a bad thing, it makes people more comfortable around you. It is a kindness effort.

In the aftermath of the Orlando tragedy and as the LGBTQIA+ community recovers, we as millennials will learn what we can do as future politians, CEOs, researchers, community leaders, educators and, most importantly, parents. We will have heated debates where one side wants to build a wall between two land-bordered countries and the other wants to open immigration. Our pride will get in the way just like the generations before us have, but we should remember what our goal is, and it isn’t to make America great again or to make a future to believe in, it is to give our kids everything they need to survive, to work together to achieve this goal.

Who would have thought measles, a disease that had been considered eradicated in the United States, would make a reappearance? This is just one example of an effect caused by bad science, people making false claims or journals distorting factual evidence. This, along with a populous that does not fact check and does not actively examine the credibility of sources, leads to massive movements that have no factual base whatsoever. These movements (I am looking at you anti-vaxxers) just create fear and decrease public health. As a biologist who intended to research diseases with the intent to develop vaccines and study the way the disease spreads, this type of mass anti-vaccination movement just inhibits the effect of vaccines which gain effectiveness using herd immunity, meaning over 90 percent of the society needs to be vaccinated for the society to be protected.

We all have done those dreaded group projects where one person pulls the group and there is one who doesn’t do too much to help. If we were that one person who did most of the work, why did we do it? To get the result we want. If we want to have a kind of future we wish we could have grown up in, we should get rid of our self-centered mindset, and start doing things for the good of everyone else including ourselves. Don’t knock others down to bring yourself up, because when you insult someone else, we just talk in circles and nothing gets accomplished. When nothing gets accomplished, we have a Congress that looks exactly like the current one. I use this phrase constantly, “Teamwork makes the dream work.” We all have a dream, let’s get there together.