(Written for KALW radio request to speak about the youth perspective on the elections.)
I’m a hot commodity in these presidential elections. And if you’re under 30, you are too. It doesn’t matter that you’ve never picked up a newspaper and I’m a journalism student. We’re practically the same person.
That is, according to the media these days. I’m in my late twenties so I’m part of that amorphous “youth vote.” You know, it’s the one that encompasses everyone from Peace Corp volunteers to young corporate lawyers. Suddenly, I speak for all of them.
The truth is there really isn’t a simple way to define this age bracket. I have peers who write for three different political blogs and those who blink in confusion when NAFTA is mentioned. My friend doesn’t talk to her older brother about politics without verbal warfare, even though they fall into the same “youth vote” category.
I’m supposed to be speaking to you about the young person’s perspective on the presidential election, as if I embody all the concerns and opinions of my generation. Now that many Americans have become political junkies—come on, admit it, you YouTube the political ads too—we would be wise to take the statistically comfortable, ideologically impossible groupings with a grain of salt. These include categorizations like Latino block and African-American voice.
This doesn’t mean I’m not worth listening to, but I’m one young voice, not all of them. Otherwise, I’d be a sleep-deprived college graduate who also dropped out of high school and traveled the world teaching sustainable farming. I’d have earned my masters in Asian American literature just before I got my job as a tech analyst in Silicon Valley and went to Iraq.
Candidates would do well to focus on the nuances of this voting group. And the media would too. I say, on behalf of us all.
