Just as it was true for code monkeys creating the first GUIs, the concept that bad education leads to bad understanding rears its ugly head once more in Gene Healy's recent op-ed piece for the Washington Examiner. Only this time, the coming Revolution is a hydra of youth-core extremists pounding on tables and shouting down dissent in a desperate plea to get someone, anyone to listen.
We often forget that the young voters are, in fact, young; they are headstrong, stubborn, convinced of their righteousness, and unshakeable in their convictions. For today, at least. Tomorrow, the focus may be back on Gossip Girl, who knows. But using this mercurial demographic as a basis for both an election and a party position is extremely dangerous, rather akin to playing with fire in the southern California foothills--ideas that nobody cared about in the first place get passed along so fervently due to insta-media outlets like Twits and MyFace that the "old guard" of people over age 30 are simply taken aback by their ferocity.
Seeing this explosion of effort (which is all actually quite effortless, thanks to said above insta-media), the "fuddy duddies" rally around whatever makes them look the most popular, like the latest starlet with one side of her head shaved--in the pale light of morning, these elder statesmen look simply ridiculous for having followed the whims of children. But oh-hum, these children grow up, and become "activists," angry (and now bitter, thanks to adulthood) partisans who will smear anyone or anything across the information superhighway that gets in the way of "their" candidate. Shock and awe is not just a military campaign, it seems, anymore.
So in reality, what we are dealing with is not the fallout from the miseducation of the American youth, but the radicalization of the American Memory of Youth, that wistful remembrance of better days when all these stuffy concepts and theories about jobs, economic recovery, auto manufacturers and endless option-ARM loans could be boiled down into one single defining statement that few alive today actually spoke--We Shall Overcome. Overcome... what? That's generally never answered.
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