Posts tagged with election.

Riding the coattails of hope

Ian Wylie, November 6, 2008 at 1:17 PM

 

There was a dozen of us, all in our teens, watching Tuesday's election on a little TV in a little room at Trinity. We sat down at 7 p.m., ordered pizza at 11:30 and at 1 a.m., after Barack Obama delivered his speech and the excitement of the election was usurped by the onset of sleepiness, we went to bed

 

We watched the election because it was historic and because Obama is the perfect candidate for university students. His notions of hope and change are found on every campus, in every student club trying to save the environment or end poverty. And he demonstrates that change does occur. For university students, ever wanting to improve the world they've inherited from their parents, that's important.

 

Our channel was CNN, the one with Anderson Cooper and the "Best Political Team on Television." A highlight of their coverage was a hologram of musician Will.i.am.  At one point co-host Wolf Blitzer came on and declared that people across the world would remember where they were at 11 o'clock when Barack Obama was declared president-elect.

 

We'll likely remember where we were. We'll remember how the room turned quiet when he came on stage to deliver his speech. We'll remember watching him succeed in something he set out to do around the same age that we are now. Everyone who watched him in that room has their own ambitions, existing now perhaps only as a little kernel of thought. And three or four decades from now, hopefully those little kernels will be realized like his was Tuesday night.

 

Just as I fell asleep early Wednesday morning, I received a text message from a friend watching the election in Vancouver. It read "our world is so sweet." That simple statement sums up exactly the sentiment so many students felt Tuesday night. Over the next four years, as our undergraduate degree unfolds along with Obama's first term in office, it will be interesting to see whether that sentiment stays with us. I hope it does.

 

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Low youth vote has reasons

Ian Wylie, October 14, 2008 at 2:02 PM

 

It's election day today. Likely it will be another day of minority government and poor voter turnout, particularly among young Canadians. Canadians who just recently had their names added to the register. Canadians like me.  Around election time, people my age get a sizable amount of attention in articles and editorials bemoaning the quiet death of democracy at the hands of young adults more interested in themselves than building a better society.

 

We young adults are those born in the 70s, 80s and 90s. We are members of Generation Y or Generation Me, depending on what term you prefer. We are said to be the product of an increasingly individualistic society that rears its children on a diet of mass media. We are known to be narcissistic, self-entitled, illiterate and generally deluded.  And if you were unlucky enough to be born in the 70s, you're also part of Generation X, so, along with everything mentioned above, you're lazy.

 

In Saturday's Globe and Mail, Patrick White writes about his experience with this crop of youth. White followed a group of 17-18 year olds as they made the transition from high school into post-secondary life, university or otherwise. The people he met weren't particularly unique in behaviour and  attitudes from any other generation. What did surprise White was their worldliness.

 

This is what makes my generation unique and it isn't the result of any drastic shift in cultural norms or values but the result of globalization and the revolutions in information technology and transportation.

 

In international relations theory, the grand theme right now is that the relevance of the state is diminishing as countries become more intertwined through trade, the Internet, transport and mass media. We're experiencing this blending of borders on a grand scale right now as central banks around the world simultaneously cut interest rates to contain a problem whose origins are in the American housing market.

 

This is the world that students today have been raised in. It's one of blended borders where our lives are defined on a global scale.

 

Take Julien Hernandez, mentioned in White's article, for example. Twenty years ago his dream of attending culinary school in France would be both nuts and unheard of. Not today, however. If Julien wants to attend culinary school, he can. He'll spend time in Toronto developing his skills working on a line and attending a trade school. When he's ready, he can apply to, say, Le Cordon Bleu online. If he gets in, he can find an apartment in Paris and meet people in his program all before he buys a ticket on one of the daily flights out of Pearson airport to France.

 

Perhaps this global outlook and shrinking of distances explains author Jean Twenge's belief that  "Generation Me" is so stressed and depressed. Many students today are setting their goals on a global scale and comparing themselves to a global standard. That's pretty ambitious and bound to produce the occasional disappointment.

 

Students are also hearing about issues in the media and deciding to act by founding charities and holding fundraisers. Craig Kielburger's Free the Children is the hallmark of this phenomenon. Today, students are able to organize and unite mass groups of people behind a cause. Indeed, volunteering and being part of an organization is not quite the exception it once was. Resources exist today that enable students to become active and engaged members of society at a much younger age than ever before.

 

It's getting harder and harder to not have a global perspective. Even if you ignored mass media and the Internet, an average student in Canada today has a greater global perspective today than one generation ago. The reason? The demographics of our schools. My high school was composed of students from 73 different countries of origin, representing 53 different languages. Those numbers are not unique in Canada. By default, simply because of the environments of our schools, our generation is exposed to an incredible number of opinions and cultures from a very young age.

 

So before we start bemoaning the death of democracy at the hands of our self-obsessed and excessively individualistic youth, perhaps we should take a moment to recognize that there might be more to the issue than that. Certainly generalizations and labels about youth won't do much to inspire them to take the burden of building democracy off the shoulders of the old.

 

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