Voting: Not Just Your Parents’ Job

Generation Y gets a lot of flack from the ones who came before us. We’re entitled. We like Facebook and MySpace more than picking up a book. But our political involvement in the past two elections has been momentous, to say the least.

Without our renewed sense of hope and reform, the New Deal Dems like Barack and Hillary would have been dead in the water before they started. From 2006 to 2008, their party registered nearly nine million new voters, most of them younger than 25. Even so, the generation gap in this year’s election might be the biggest deciding factor of all, and there are not enough young voters getting out to the polls in comparison to their parents and grandparents.

CBS News reports: In an October CBS News/New York Times Poll, just 58 percent of Americans under 30 said they were registered to vote. Ninety-three percent of those over 65 were. Thirty is a dividing line, it seems. Among those 30 to 44, 87 percent reported being registered.

The point? Register to vote or become everything your parents thought of your lazy, irresponsible ways in the first place.

And tell a friend.