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I register to vote
I’ve been putting off updating my voter registration until just a few minutes ago, when I decided to put off an even more boring task by updating my voter registration.
First stop, www.chooseorlose.com. Flash animations, cheering teens, techno music. “Drew Barrymore Hunts the Elusive Young Voter.” Forget voting, I wouldn’t register to receive free ringtones from this site.
Next stop, www.rockthevote.com. This is even worse. The scrolling banners are making me nauseous and every flash-animated screen has photos of painfully cool youth emoting what I can only assume is a mixture of ridicule and resentment towards my out-of-the-demographic, insufficiently-eXtreme self. I’ve never been so depressed about voting. Someone must have an online “register to vote” site for people who don’t know what a Lil’ Kim is.
Thank the boring gods for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The EFF’s voter registration page is quick and painless; you put your name and address into a web page and it gives you a filled-in, pre-addressed PDF form that you can print out and stick in the mail. Many thanks to Wendy Seltzer for providing the link. Oh, you can win $200,000 or something.
Done and done, and with ten whole days to go, I can be proud of not having waited till literally the last possible minute. Democracy is just that important! Well, I live in Massachusetts, so my vote has no real meaning anyway. Still, it’s better to be depressed about Electoral College inequity than about being too old for MTV.
September 21, 2004 | Permalink
Comments
Your observations reminded me of midnight basketball for "at risk" youth. Remember that? It was hailed as a way to keep kids off the streets and out of trouble, and of course was embraced by the politicians of the moment. Then one commentator was bold enough to observe that none of the upper class politicos would ever approve of their kid going to a city-sponsored ball game at midnight on a school night when they should really be home studying. The condescending (and unstated) belief, of course, was that those kids will never do well in school anyway and since their parents can’t take care of them, let's at least keep them off the streets.
"Rock the Vote" and the like are certainly going after a niche, and it may be a large niche, however I've never understood the histrionics around getting unregistered folks of any age to register and vote. If they need Bruce Springsteen—sorry, showing my age—to motivate them, I’d rather not have them voting in elections whose winners will determine whether we go to war or enact huge new entitlement programs that saddle generations with mountains of debt.
And while I won’t suggest (here, at least) that this is yet another sign of the decline of Western civilization, the fact that the celebrity/rock star crowd are promoted as role models of voter engagement serves to trivialize the issues and further erodes public policy discourse. (Granted, this battle was really fought and lost years ago, way before Lil’ Kim, faxed forged National Guard docs, and the Swiftboat Vets.)
Now in terms of Phil and Lil’ Kim, _there’s_ a colorful image. Forget the pics of Foo Camp. Let’s see Phil earn his street cred with Lil’ Kim.
Posted by: | Sep 22, 2004 1:39:17 AM
