A big story this week was the findings of a poll on the political views of people ages 17 to 29. The nation’s papers reported that, according to the poll, young people were much more likely than older people to know which end was up! Or, as some put it, that young people were more “liberal” in their views.
For one, young people believe that the sham healthcare system the insurance companies have fitted our country with totally sucks. They also believe that immigrants should be neither persecuted nor prosecuted and that politicians have to deal with massive immigration from Latin America as an ongoing fact of our national life and a good thing, too. They also don’t think any gay person crazy enough to want to get hitched should be denied the right to do so. Such a gay person should instead be applauded and provided with a free bottle of champagne courtesy of the vice president.
There were only two real surprises in the poll results. The first was that young people are generally more optimistic about the eventual conclusion of W’s war in Iraq, that the Iraqis and the Americans together will manage to steal victory from the jaws of defeat after being set up to do the opposite for the last five years. The New York Times reported, however, that young folk traditionally feel more positive about military action as it’s happening, that they felt the same way about Korea and Vietnam. Maybe that’s because it’s always all their high school pals over there actually fighting these wars, blowing up and getting blown up.
The second sort of surprise was that the poll was a joint effort of the New York Times, CBS News and MTV. MTV? That’s right, good old Morbid Television. It’s just more evidence that (a) whenever adults like the stuffy bunch at the Gray Lady think of youth, they think: “Um, kids… what about MTV? Can MTV find us some kids to call?” and (b) that MTV is so uncool that even MTV has given up even pretending to be cool anymore. In fact MTV probably had some of the next RealWorld cast making the polling phone calls as part of their “real world” professional training:
“Dude, help me out, I’m so totally hung over and sexed out, but if you were, like, gonna say thumbs up or thumbs down about immigration, you know, like what would it be?”
Tags: mtv, young people