Young Voters Cavalier
Jordana Willner
Originally published San Francisco Chronicle
Sunday, November 5, 2000
I'VE NEVER been the jealous type, but my inner green is showing in this election season. For months, as I've gnawed nails and split hairs over the sociopolitical issues at stake, my single, twentysomething brethren have lolled idly around in the luxurious, enviable position of thumbing their noses at the whole production.
Young Americans -- the approximately 60 million 18- to 34-year-olds who make up nearly 25 percent of eligible voters -- are parroting a well-rehearsed mantra that the issues don't concern them, so they don't really care. It's a catchy little generational chant that no one taught me. Lucky ducks. How divine their lives must be to let the bread-and-butter concerns of a nation roll smoothly off their disinterested backs. How utterly entitled to float through life unencumbered and rootless, without the pesky nagging of familial obligations, societal accountability or -- gulp -- a future.
How did they get to be so free? How did they qualify for such pervasive and well-documented disinterest? Where do I sign up? If only I could be so cavalier and unfettered as to disdainfully shake my smug young head and say that the issues being bandied about are someone else's concern. But, alas, I do not exist in a self-contained living apparatus. I function as part of a complex interactive contracts I like to think of as family, friends, and country. Poor me, I never get a break.
If I did, I could agree with lucky- duck up-and-comer Jakki Taylor, a 28-year-old producer of the ABC talk show, ``The View,'' who is quoted by the show's co-host Lisa Ling as saying, ``I'm just not concerned about Social Security, prescription drugs and health care.'' Ling, 27, writing in USA Weekend, is also in the enviable position of noting that, ``The defining issue for many Americans hasn't been health care or education; it's been IPOs.''
Say what? Sure, we've had a lucrative couple years. But even as college rags turned to post-IPO riches, I was not aware we blessed young folk had received tower clearance for societal secession. Guess I missed the airlift to Next Generation nirvana.
But I, poor burdened soul, have parents. And having watched both endure recent surgeries, I worry about a viable Medicare system being in place to treat them with affordable, dignified quality health care as they age, and I worry that without it, I could be financially responsible for their costly care.
I fret about education. I may not have kids yet, but even as a future parent, I apparently didn't make the cut to join those prestigious young voters who plan to have children but who seem to think schools are someone else's business.
Taxes concern me. I am not nearly so lucky as my arrogant counterparts, who earn such gargantuan sums of techno-dollars that they can't be bothered to wonder how much is withheld for the taxes they say are none of their affair. Facing a daily commute, I find it hard to imagine the happy place where discussions of oil dependency, availability and prices are not relevant to me. But for my friends who don't think beyond the pump, I have to assume that unrest in the Middle East, endangered environmental preserves, and too slow-to-come clean-fuel-burning automobiles are equally disinteresting.
Am I cavorting within a generation of self-centered, shortsighted brats living in a bubble? Do I represent a cringing minority who understands the vast network of interdependency and accountability that sustains us?
Surely, the intelligent, hardworking offspring of the activist '60s could not be this hopelessly selfish. It must simply be the case that someone forgot to let me in on the secret. That it's all going to be OK. That Supreme Court justices who uphold my beliefs grow on Washington trees. That the Earth we inherit will remain inhabitable. That the stock market can only go up. That a budget surplus is sure as the rising of the sun. That we'll never get old or be in need. That our loved ones will magically care for themselves. Yes, I must be the mistaken one. Because if not, if young voters are simply crowding into an untouchable, self-important fantasy camp, where the glow of invincible youth blinds them from life's political, social and economic realities, it could take a cataclysmic change in their comfort level to awaken them to their own relevance.
And by then, it might be too late.
--Jordana Willner wrote a monthly "Next Generation" column for the San Francisco Chronicle in 1999, 2000, and 2001
Originally published San Francisco Chronicle
Sunday, November 5, 2000
I'VE NEVER been the jealous type, but my inner green is showing in this election season. For months, as I've gnawed nails and split hairs over the sociopolitical issues at stake, my single, twentysomething brethren have lolled idly around in the luxurious, enviable position of thumbing their noses at the whole production.
Young Americans -- the approximately 60 million 18- to 34-year-olds who make up nearly 25 percent of eligible voters -- are parroting a well-rehearsed mantra that the issues don't concern them, so they don't really care. It's a catchy little generational chant that no one taught me. Lucky ducks. How divine their lives must be to let the bread-and-butter concerns of a nation roll smoothly off their disinterested backs. How utterly entitled to float through life unencumbered and rootless, without the pesky nagging of familial obligations, societal accountability or -- gulp -- a future.
How did they get to be so free? How did they qualify for such pervasive and well-documented disinterest? Where do I sign up? If only I could be so cavalier and unfettered as to disdainfully shake my smug young head and say that the issues being bandied about are someone else's concern. But, alas, I do not exist in a self-contained living apparatus. I function as part of a complex interactive contracts I like to think of as family, friends, and country. Poor me, I never get a break.
If I did, I could agree with lucky- duck up-and-comer Jakki Taylor, a 28-year-old producer of the ABC talk show, ``The View,'' who is quoted by the show's co-host Lisa Ling as saying, ``I'm just not concerned about Social Security, prescription drugs and health care.'' Ling, 27, writing in USA Weekend, is also in the enviable position of noting that, ``The defining issue for many Americans hasn't been health care or education; it's been IPOs.''
Say what? Sure, we've had a lucrative couple years. But even as college rags turned to post-IPO riches, I was not aware we blessed young folk had received tower clearance for societal secession. Guess I missed the airlift to Next Generation nirvana.
But I, poor burdened soul, have parents. And having watched both endure recent surgeries, I worry about a viable Medicare system being in place to treat them with affordable, dignified quality health care as they age, and I worry that without it, I could be financially responsible for their costly care.
I fret about education. I may not have kids yet, but even as a future parent, I apparently didn't make the cut to join those prestigious young voters who plan to have children but who seem to think schools are someone else's business.
Taxes concern me. I am not nearly so lucky as my arrogant counterparts, who earn such gargantuan sums of techno-dollars that they can't be bothered to wonder how much is withheld for the taxes they say are none of their affair. Facing a daily commute, I find it hard to imagine the happy place where discussions of oil dependency, availability and prices are not relevant to me. But for my friends who don't think beyond the pump, I have to assume that unrest in the Middle East, endangered environmental preserves, and too slow-to-come clean-fuel-burning automobiles are equally disinteresting.
Am I cavorting within a generation of self-centered, shortsighted brats living in a bubble? Do I represent a cringing minority who understands the vast network of interdependency and accountability that sustains us?
Surely, the intelligent, hardworking offspring of the activist '60s could not be this hopelessly selfish. It must simply be the case that someone forgot to let me in on the secret. That it's all going to be OK. That Supreme Court justices who uphold my beliefs grow on Washington trees. That the Earth we inherit will remain inhabitable. That the stock market can only go up. That a budget surplus is sure as the rising of the sun. That we'll never get old or be in need. That our loved ones will magically care for themselves. Yes, I must be the mistaken one. Because if not, if young voters are simply crowding into an untouchable, self-important fantasy camp, where the glow of invincible youth blinds them from life's political, social and economic realities, it could take a cataclysmic change in their comfort level to awaken them to their own relevance.
And by then, it might be too late.
--Jordana Willner wrote a monthly "Next Generation" column for the San Francisco Chronicle in 1999, 2000, and 2001
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