I’m Aiden Hamilton. I was born and raised on the Olympic Peninsula, where my parents — and theirs before them — grew up. My father worked in law enforcement, while my mother spent my younger years raising our family.

When I was 7, my father suffered from a nearly fatal, debilitating illness that kept him out of work for almost a year. My family’s dream of owning a home — along with our savings — was lost and never recovered. When he returned to the same job for the same salary, my father quickly realized we couldn’t build up a savings on his income anymore, so my mother took a job to help rebuild the income needed to buy a home. We watched our savings drain. Inflation emptied what little remained.

RESILIENCE & COMMITMENT

During the pandemic, our legislature failed to consider the unintended consequences of their actions and sent my peers and me out of public school for two years — with ramifications we still see today. After we were sent home, I never saw another day of instruction that year. The following year, in my new online school, I struggled to keep up due to limited help from the school district and no help from my exhausted parents, who both worked to keep up with the rent. Only with help from others outside my family was I able to turn things around — from being a month behind in my schoolwork to graduating early and among the best in my class.

WHAT THIS MEANS

Throughout my childhood, I watched the deterioration of our economy. I saw my generation fall behind in school. Now, our working-class economy is a distant memory, with housing unaffordable or unavailable for first-time home buyers and people just starting out in life. Since 2000, the Democratic Party has held a trifecta in the legislature for sixteen of the past twenty-five years — and absolute power for most of the rest. We’ve had thirteen midterm elections since then. Why do they deserve a fourteenth chance to make things right?

TODAY

Our legislature wants to fix the problems in learning loss from COVID-19  but not one member of the legislature faced the same loss of learning. My generation has. Believing in the next generation doesn’t mean talking about fighting for the future. It means electing the next generation of voices. But right now, there isn’t a single representative in Olympia, who can look a student in the eye and say “I know what it’s like to lose two years of my education to a pandemic’. Olympia needs that, and I will be the first.