By Admin1 (admin) on Tuesday, November 05, 2002 - 4:56 pm: Edit Post |
Young people offer hope for our political salvation
When you see a candidate endorsed by a large group of knowledgeable young people, you can be assured that there is something more to that candidate than simply rhetoric. In contrast, when youth involvement is low in a campaign, chances are that candidate is little more than veneer.Read the op-ed at:
It is no fluke that George McGovern, the ’60s presidential peace candidate, was constantly surrounded by a huge cadre of young people, or that the marches on Washington for an end to the Vietnam War, and equal rights and opportunities for African-Americans were made up mostly of young people. It is no surprise that the message of John F. Kennedy resonated with young people to the point that thousands signed up to spend two years in some of the poorest and most forsaken places on this Earth as part of the newly created Peace Corps.
We who lived through the turbulent ’60s and ’70s, who witnessed the deaths of some of our greatest and best-loved political leaders, who lost friends to a war waged for purely political purposes, have, in many cases, opted out of the political process, considering it a sham where the winners are often determined by political inside-the-Beltway leaders and affluent special interests.
But we still remember when we believed we could make a difference, when we stopped a war purely on the strength of our convictions, when we believed we could change the world. These children, with their signs and placards, rekindle the light, urge us to take our tarnished idealism out of our inner closets and make us believe there is hope for us and our country to live up to the ideals we and our Founding Fathers professed all those years ago.