Why should we care?

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Created on Thursday, 16 February 2012 17:04

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Opinion

By Jed Hackett

Have you ever wondered what you're eating when you take a bite of your favorite fast food? Maybe you should start.

As we live in an increasingly young world where the younger generation starts to take on the responsibilities the older generations has passed down, many start to wonder, does this generation’s youth even care?

The youth of the world today has shown some of its power to bring about change through Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street, and other grassroots movements pledging to bring about change. But the older generation of America questions whether or not the American youth is ready to lead.

As we enter an election year, we can notice that the youngest candidate for the Presidency of the U.S. is Rick Santorum. And even he himself is not young, being 53. So maybe there is some logic behind the older generation thinking we, the youth, are not ready to take charge.

But maybe they have not considered the fact that as we try to introduce our own opinions and solutions to problems, the adults dismiss these solutions as childish. With each new opinion we try to introduce, they shut it down. But they applaud us when an idea we do put to work actually does work, but only because we did it against their wishes.

And then the older generation turns around and congratulates itself on encouraging us to go through with it; hypocrisy at its finest.

Kyle Norman, a freshman at Granite Hills, says he does not particularly care for politics.

“I'm busy and have other things to worry about rather than the science of the political government thinks and what decisions they make. At this point in my life it doesn’t interest me what so ever,” stated Norman.

And who’s to say that the youth should care about the ways of the world? It’s not like the adults did when they were young. But in this new sort of world, the youth should care about what goes on.

Juan Jaimez, a junior from Granite Hills, thinks that the youth should care.

“It's better to know about politics and become educated at a young age than to be indoctrinated into a biased media when you’re older,” stated Jaimez.

We can see how things do not work, and offer a new prospective on how things should work and could work. I for one think that the majority of the youth should become more active in the politics of the United States.

As we saw in the 2008 presidential election, the youth can have an impact on politics. Barack Obama was able to mobilize a previously untapped resource available to presidential candidates. He took to the social networking sites, and woke up the youth to partake in that year’s elections. That year, we saw a surge in the amount of young adult participants voting for a single participant; of the 24 million people that were under the age of 29, 66% of them voted for Obama.

Overall, we have seen that the youth can make a difference in politics if it tries and wants to. But why should they actually care about what goes on in politics?

The answer is simple, to be informed later. A large number of American youth are growing up to the age of 18 and registering to vote without knowing too much about the topics their candidates stand for. I mean, how many young people actually know about Rick Santorum’s stance on Iraq, or Mitt Romney’s stance on Obamacare?

And here they go to the polls, clueless about topics that could change future generations, armed only with what they have been told by their parents. Perhaps they are going just because they grew up going to the polls.

Do we really want to hold our political futures in the hands of ill-informed or hardly informed young adults? I for one don’t.

But how can we stop this? Simply, there is no way to ensure our voters are informed. No way to implement programs without being called unconstitutional by either side of the spectrum. So do we just let it go on?

I say that’s a problem we let another generation sort out. I think this generation will be too busy trying to clean up the mess from the previous one.

Above photo: Video clip of Clay Congdon interviewing Joey Carrillo. (Video by Michael Cruz)

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