In case anyone thinks the under-30 crowd is indifferent to politics or the general state of the world, here’s a good example of our… passion…
On Halloween, my boyfriend and I went to a bar by the beach with some of his former hockey teammates. Hockey players are the biggest lushes you can imagine, and by about midnight, many of them were thoroughly intoxicated, to say the least. One of them came up to me, out of nowhere, and said, “You’re voting for McCain, right?” I laughed and said, “No.” He wanted to know why not. Having had a couple of drinks myself — or maybe just because I’m delusional — I had this crazy idea that continuing the conversation might actually accomplish something, so we began to engage in political discourse.
As much as I like to discuss politics, even I could soon tell this conversation was going nowhere. I would state a fact — an actual fact, such as, “Drilling for oil disrupts ecosystems” — and the teammate would say, “I disagree!” The first time he said this I replied, “It doesn’t matter if you disagree! That’s the way it is,” but I soon realized it would be best to use that line as an opportunity to end the discussion. “Okay, you disagree,” I said the next time. “That’s fine, we’re allowed to disagree. Let’s talk about something else.” He didn’t want to talk about something else, though. He wanted to tell me about how Obama is a socialist and drilling is good.
Then an environmental studies graduate student from UCLA overheard us talking about the d-word and the e-word (drilling and ecosystems, respectively). He joined the conversation, his friends joined the conversation, and pretty soon the boys were talking all at once. Then other random people who just happened to be in the bar came up and starting asking me what was going on and trying to get in on the action.
So pretty soon the whole outdoor patio of this bar was engaged in a political debate, at which point the UCLA grad student asked the hockey player what he had studied in school. “I was a business student,” the teammate replied. The grad student answered, “Oh that explains it.” Then he laughed and walked away. Poor decision. The teammate took off after him and chased him through the bar. Soon the teammate, dressed in a paisley shirt with his hair teased up into a ’70s hippie fro, was violently debating the grad student, AKA the Skipper and his crew from Gilligan’s Island. At this point the teammate/hippie’s girlfriend noticed he was getting in the skipper’s space and trying to start a fight. My boyfriend had to intervene before punches were thrown.
So yes, Millennials care about the Election. And I knew they cared even before they turned out in record highs to help elect Barack Obama on Nov. 4. When I told my journalism adviser from high school that I almost helped start a bar fight over Obama, he sent me a message that said, “I’ve never been more proud of you, including when you won Journalist of the Year.”
