More and More, Young People Know--and Care--Less

‘This is the Fourth?” --Thomas Jefferson’s last words, July 4, 1826

Jacqueline French, 22 years old, a year out of San Diego State University, is aghast. She knows what they’re saying about her generation is true. She can see it, even among her friends.

“Just the other day, one of my girlfriends says to me, ‘What’s our vice president’s name?’ And I said, ‘Oh my God .’ . . . She’s a USC graduate. She’s smart. She graduated with a 3.0 average. But for her, politics isn’t key. It’s how you look and how you are judged.”

For the record, Jacqueline French, who lives in Mission Viejo and works for an advertising agency in Newport Beach, knows who Dan Quayle is. And she votes--”my father’s a total Republican”--and she reads the newspapers and the news magazines and wistfully imagines the civic spirit associated with John F. Kennedy and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

And she considers herself different from most others her age.

Which sounds about right.

When I met Jacqueline French, sitting outside an Irvine restaurant on her lunch break, I’d just read “The Age of Indifference,” a new study of polling results over the last 50 years.

The study was sponsored by Times Mirror, the publisher of this newspaper, and for those of us in this business, the news it delivered wasn’t too good.

Today’s generation of young adults, i.e., those between the ages of 18 and 30, know and care less about public affairs than any other generation in the last half-century. They are far less likely to read newspapers than young people a generation ago. They also watch less news on TV, are less able to identify frequent news-makers and are less interested in public events.

All this despite the fact that these same young people are better educated than those who have gone before them. Of all age groups, those over 50 are most interested in public affairs. Young people’s voting participation has declined in every presidential election since 1972.

“I think it’s our world,” says Jacqueline. “We take America for granted. We don’t see what we have got. Just take a drive, an hour and a half away, to Mexico. Look how things are there.”

But most of us--young and old and somewhere in between--confine our comparative shopping to the stores at the mall. Voter apathy, the pundits lament, is a national disgrace. Especially while people are dying in other parts of the world for the right to cast a free vote.

Still, to the apathetic, such arguments are usually a waste of breath. In my mind I envision a parent commanding a child to clean her plate because someone far less fortunate is starving somewhere else.

Today’s young people say public affairs have nothing to do with their world, their right now. And if they don’t use their vote, they can’t very well send it to a Cuban, or a South African, or a North Korean, who’s yearning to be free.

Natalia Bowens, 23, a bank teller who lives in Buena Park, has never voted. She occasionally scans a newspaper--a crime story can sometimes hold her interest--but usually any news she gets will come from TV.

“To be very honest, the reason is because I’m just not interested,” she tells me. “News is really boring to me. It doesn’t seem to affect me. Even South Africa. It’s not America, not here. I’m Afro-American. If it were like South Africa here, I would be ready to go into the streets and fight. But I’m not being put in jail for walking down a white person’s street.”

Keith Thacker, a 28-year-old carpenter from Laguna Hills, says all the bad news gets him down. So he avoids it, simple as that.

He doesn’t read newspapers--”I’d rather read things that are more meaningful for me, like the Bible, things that are going to help me grow spiritually”--and he usually doesn’t get out to vote.

O f course he knows who Dan Quayle is, Keith says. But aside from Washington Mayor Marion Barry, on trial for allegedly smoking crack cocaine, he can’t summon the name of any other politician--state, national or here at home.

“No, I’m not really good at names,” he says. “And besides, right now, none of that fits into my lifestyle.”

The era of upheaval--Watergate, Vietnam, civil rights--is in the past, as stale as last year’s prime time TV. That, at least, is what many young people say. Now’s the time for peacetime pursuits: kick back and relax. And make money. And have a blast.

The media, of course, trumpet the same themes. Issues take diligence and time. Catchy slogans and buzzwords pique people’s interest. Publishers, television news executives and political candidates are reading the polling studies that tell them as much all the time.

“We’re getting used to fast food news,” says UC Irvine’s Martin Wattenberg, an associate professor of political science. “Even the L.A. Times has gone to a faster format.”

Still, Wattenberg laments, the idea of a democracy is that the people rule “and if people aren’t paying attention, they can hardly rule well.”

“People don’t have to know everything,” he says, “but they should know enough to choose others to lead them. . . . That’s why incumbents today have such an advantage. People recognize a name. . . . Today we have less turnover in the U.S. Congress than the Soviets do in the Central Committee. And that’s a disgrace.”

Or, as does economist Amihai Glazer, who directs UC Irvine’s Research Group on Public Choice, one could look at such things in a different light.

“By and large, people are satisfied,” Glazer says. “They think government is doing a reasonable job. And besides, if you look at the research that’s been done, you find that the people who didn’t vote would have voted like those who did--if they had taken the time. . . . It’s not at all clear that knowledge in and of itself makes for better government.”

It’s unwise, of course, to draw rigid conclusions from a study purporting to tell us how people think. There are many, many exceptions to any norm.

Nonetheless, “The Age of Indifference” has me concerned. It’s only the latest reminder of a generation’s inward turn.

Yes, our nation has had its revolution. Today is the day that we are celebrating that. But, God willing, there will be other revolts down the line, large ones and small. And for that, everyone should prepare.

“If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.”

It was Thomas Jefferson who said that.

Dianne Klein’s column appears Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Readers may reach Klein by writing to her at The Times Orange County Edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, Calif. 92626, or calling (714) 966-7406.