A New Tide
Tomorrow, Barack Obama will be sworn in as our nations 44th President.
Fall, 2004. Evanston, Illinois. Political signs are staring to pop up everywhere, tis the season. A classmate tries to convince me to go hear Barack Obama during a Senatorial Debate at our University. I respond “Barack who?”, I had an Ice Hockey Game anyway. Over the course of that fall missing that debate became a huge regret as I quickly learned who this elusive Barack Obama was.
November 4, 2008. 10:15pm. San Francisco. The streets are clogged, horns are honking and lightpoles rattling. Young people everywere are dancing, dancing in the streets. Barack Obama, the 47 year old junior Senator from Chicago has just been elected President of the United States.
In 2001 Robert Putnum, leading political scientist at Harvard University published the book Bowling Alone. Putnam suggested catastrophic declines in social capital were happening across the US. These declines were leading to all time low levels of civic engagement, and especially steep declines in voter turnout, most marked among young people, voters aged 18-29. Among other things, Putnam lamented that since voting was habitual, the longer it took young people to start voting, the less likely they would ever be to vote.
In 2002 I co-founded (with Zach) a non-profit, Votes For Students, premised on the idea that my generation lacked not social capital, social know-how. Especially when it came to politics. VFS suggested that with increased information, and forms of engagement tailored to our needs, namely bringing politics online, young people would engage and participate in large numbers. VFS isn’t around anymore, but I am thrilled to see that eight years after the publicans of Putnams book, young people have proved its premise wrong by not only voting (turnout was 11% higher then in 2000), but by participating in the campaigns of Barack Obama and John McCain and Hilary Clinton in record numbers.
When Barack Obama is sworn in tomorrow, I will stand most proud of my generation for clearly demonstrating that we aren’t apathetic, we don’t lack social capital, we just needed politics to go digital.
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