Political Good Ole Days

It light of the recent political climate nationally, I have started asking myself some uncomfortable questions and have found that I really don’t like the answers. Perhaps the most troubling question is the one that sheds a dim light on future elections and decision making. Are the young millennial and generation Z( those from teens to early thirties) really prepared to make educated decisions when electing those that will be our policy makers and life changers? Have we given them the tools to weed through the rhetoric and posturing-through the social media driven one brain thinking that is being fed to their generations? Or will they exercise the privilege of the vote like they are the privileged generations?

Frankly, the democrats and republicans don’t scare me. The Blue Dogs and the Grand Old Party have coexisted for years. Sure, some years are better than others but all were manageable because everyone understood exactly what was on the line. But, as boomers age out and millennials and their even more out there predecessors take the numerical lead as the generations with the most voting power, I worry that they simply don’t have a clue how the real world works. After all, they have grown up in a generation were there are no absolutes. The rules are blended and bent, no winners and no losers, there are no absolutes even with gender. To say that they are generations that are floundering under their own misconceptions is an understatement. Maybe life will teach the lessons that we, as their mentors, failed to teach. I certainly hope so but I fear what happens to us during the learning curve.

How do we expect generations that have never worked to understand the importance of unemployment rates or minimum wage wars? How do we expect generations that have very few defined rules to understand that without rules we live in chaos? Where will they get the experience to know if policies presented in the future are far fetched when they can’t even make a phone call to get information because they have spent no time honing the skills that are required for face to face( or voice to voice) interaction? You simply can’t read between the line on a text, no matter how many emoji symbols you use.

For me, the most disturbing part is that there is noting that we can do, educationally, to teach those already of voting age about the ins and outs of real life. Not only have we sheltered these generations to the point of crippling them when it comes to real life, we now have to be willing to let real life step in and do what is does without giving in to the urge to bail them out. Our best hope is that these next few years will be eye opening for at least the majority of the young and upcoming.

Some will say that I am being too hard on the kids. I hope that they are right. It may be that their own inability to engage in the world in a real and productive way will be the only thing that saves us from their voting power. If we ever get a voting app we are in serious trouble and I fear that the 2020-2021 political year will look like the good old days.

Source: K. Depew, News Director