(cross-posted from a comment i made on MyDD)
i am a young voter working on a local campaign where young voters may turn the race. although my people recognize that they are NOT young voters and have placed me on point for mobilizing young voter turnout, i find it incomprehensible how few people overall have bothered to learn about us.
repeatedly i have found myself biting my tongue as Baby Boomers lecture me on how i don't know anything about young voters, that all the research performed at Harvard is bunk and that the only way to get young voters to turn out is to rent limos to drive them to the polls. in spite of the level of debate one can easily find on MyS, in chat rooms and at coffeeshops about important legislation, i am told that young voters aren't informed, don't care and will only turn out if there is some immediate payoff (like a limo ride) in it for them. and i find myself thinking...
'It will serve you right if we don't turn out if this is the way you are going to view and treat us.''Apparently, activism in the iPod generation
doesn't count the way it did in the LP age,' my cynical side snarks, 'or at least not as much given the persistence of self-righteous dismissal by Baby Boomers and the MSM even when it occurs at remarkable levels, across partisan divides, and changes the political landscape.'
traditional political bodies continue to speak down to young voters - when they bother to speak to them at all - and drive them further away with polemic rhetoric. contemporary attempts to improve things using the 'old' protest system generally fail, and an insidious hopelessness pervades
young voter consciousness.
so now we begin a new approach...
young activists have begun to move away from traditional protests and toward more organized yet non-partisan activism through groups like
The League of Pissed-off Voters. they speak among themselves, investigate issues on their own, spurn
traditional and untrusted news sources, and make their own organizing decisions more and more
outside the framework of partisanship.
if they want to keep their issues on the table long-term, Baby Boomers had best take note because we are mobilizing our roommates, turning up at the polls in increasing numbers, and voting our issues, and as much as i hate to quote Mayer, he is right,
"one day our generation is gonna rule the population."
