The
The presidential campaign is drawing global interest, but young people from Virginia to Silicon Valley — students and teachers, shopkeepers and baristas, engineers and lawn mowers — feel isolated from it. Their Facebook feeds are cluttered with political headlines and outrage. They see snippets of Clinton and Trump on Snapchat. Some of them follow daily developments on news websites. But they don’t hear anything from Clinton or Trump that sounds like solutions for their own challenges. (our emphasis)Look, we love Millennials (our children are Millennials), and we recognize this article was intended to feed the non- stop corporate media narratives that 1) folks are angry! and isolated! and disconnected! and 2) the choices are equally bad! At the risk of sounding like angry old guys, finding uninformed folks like the ones interviewed in the article couldn't have been all that difficult because there are folks like them in every demographic, in every part of the country. We could toss a rock outside our houses and hit a few in their empty heads. (OK, we sound like angry old guys.) But, this isn't your "normal" election, where a lazy reliance on popular culture memes (and there are loads of them quoted in the article) is an acceptable way of making a choice, or not making one.
Just taking that one paragraph above, if these Millennials are just relying on Facebook or Snapchat to inform their decisions, they're not trying very hard to help themselves out here. They're not really being responsible citizens if they have time to share their lack of knowledge with a reporter but not enough to, say, look at the Democratic platform or the site that has all they need to know about Hillary Clinton's "solutions." It's really not that hard, and it doesn't take that long.
Millennials have the lowest voter turnout rate of any demographic. Low voter turnout is a chronic characteristic of "young voters" (they just don't turn out in the same rates as older voters -- never have, including when we were that age). Maybe some of those interviewed will figure things out and vote for (as Michael Bloomberg said) the "sane" candidate, some may vote for the dangerous, neo- fascist sh*tgibbon, and some will be just too lazy to get around to doing anything. History, though, moves on with or without them.
UPDATE: We're happy to report that, contrary to what you might glean from the
