UNINVOLVED - THE YOUNG VOTER

Every election brings it up. The same old story about how young voters don’t vote. In the last several elections, voters 20-24 stayed away to the tune of something like 4 million. We are determined to keep asking them why – even though the answer is always the same: politicians don’t speak to our needs. My question: how would you know if you aren’t paying attention?

One editorial comment, it doesn’t matter where it was because I forget, commented about youth “cocooned in a world of text messages and ear buds.” It’s something I have uncharitably said in the past. It labels me an old fogy who does not understand what the “kids” are all about. Oh yes I do. They are, for the most part, so self-absorbed, so caught up in their own worlds, that they don’t know anything else. Even worse, they don’t care. Our youth has abandoned us.

In this campaign, if they are listening. Michael Ignatieff has pledged a program that would help pay for college tuition – a subject that, if you ask them, is important. The young always bring up. Let’s face it – they are concerned about the world they live in, and that world excludes irritating things like Federal elections.

So we go on again and again – fulminating about how the young don’t care or won’t care.

What is – is. Get over it. They may not know who is running in their riding, but they know Charlie Sheen is coming to Massey Hall.

On the larger issue of youthful indifference there was a salutory event in the U.S. in 2008: Obama, using social networking and everything else in the internet, rallied about him an astonishing number of young voters. He was like a rock star. There was a bandwagon and no one between the ages of 18 and 25 wanted to miss it. That is not to say that it was the youth vote alone that propelled the Obama revolution, but it sure helped. The point can be made that the off-year shellacking that the Democrats suffered was because those devoted fans didn’t both to go to the polls. The almost hysterical Obama supporters didn’t see it as “cool” to care who got elected to Congress in a year when the president was not running. So they stayed home with their faithful ear buds.

I am really sorry that I feel compelled to write like old-fogy-attacking-the-young. I think I’m as upset that we keep going back to the same questions and getting same answers, yet we still try to fathom the mystery of youthful political indifference. Forget it. Hope they grow up. Hope they don’t become frightened conservative suburbanites clinging to a precious shred of respectability, and trying to carry the burden of a needless mortgage. The answer to the “why” is that this is not the radical 60s. Stop whining about it and get involved yourself.