Time to step up, time to bother

Time spent recently with journalism students at the University of Washington offered an informative slice of young life. Each day I expected to have to stave off panic about declines in the media industry. Emotions akin to, "Would the last person to read a newspaper please file it in the time capsule?"

The panic never materialized. In one class after another — from basic journalism to upper-level politics and blogging — young people spoke with the pent-up energy of thoroughbreds at a starting gate.

Confident, articulate and eager to join the fray describes best my window into Generation Me. This is their time. May they make the best use of it. They can start by voting.

A lot is being made of youthful participation in the contests for president. Every caucus and primary is punctuated by breathless reportage about the hordes of young people marching in lockstep for Barack Obama or Ron Paul or whomever.

There is much potential. Young-voter turnout rose in 2004 and again in 2006, marking political activism greater than previous generations of young people.

It makes sense. These are contentious times and young people are on the front lines. Young men between the ages of 18 and 25 are required to register for Selective Service. Two wars in, America may turn that requirement into a draft. These are kids entering the job market at the start of an economic slide.

Generation Me has a lot at stake; the upticks in political activism portend much. But this is the kind of political promise that, statistically speaking, these young folks have never lived up to.

More than half of the people ages 18 to 24 are registered to vote in Washington state. More than a third never have.

So despite the political maturation of social networking sites that have turned into online rallies — despite Obama's very JFK-esque appeal to Generation Me to step up and be counted — statistically speaking, they're unlikely to bother.

A week before he announced his candidacy, Obama spoke to a packed auditorium at George Mason University in Virginia and credited previous generations of young people with forcing change through the civil-rights movement and the Vietnam War protests.

Invoking Martin Luther King Jr.'s prophecy that "the arc of the moral universe ... bends toward justice," Obama added: "Here's the thing, young people, it doesn't bend on its own, it bends because you put your hand on that arc and you bend it in the direction of justice.

"Think about all the power that's represented here in all of you ... If you all grab that arc, then I have no doubt, I have absolutely no doubt, that regardless of what happens in this presidential year and regardless of what happens in this campaign, America will transform itself."

I'm focusing on Obama to the exclusion of the other Democratic and Republican candidates in the field because the Illinois senator has struck a resounding chord with Generation Me. This is a cohort that watched the nation convulse through the impeachment of Bill Clinton and lurch from Sept. 11 to an invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan.

"To a civic-minded generation that engages in community service at record levels but generally doesn't vote or trust in politics as a force to change the world — Obama's past as a community organizer in the South Side of Chicago resonates," wrote the Nation magazine.

Young people at the UW and across the nation can't define the political transformation they're seeking, but they want to be part of it. Tomorrow's journalists want to bear witness to the change.

I can't stop thinking about the statistics. In the 2004 presidential election, just 47 percent of 18- to 24-year-old citizens voted, compared with 66 percent of citizens 25 and older. Dismal numbers for young people but still a jump of 11 percentage points from four years earlier, according to the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement.

We could use a political revolution of the kind I see brewing around me. But real change begins with the simplest act: voting.

I gave the UW journalism students what I hoped was good advice for their careers and their lives. But the most important advice is this: Break the stereotype; get out and vote.

Lynne K. Varner's column appears regularly on editorial pages of The Times. Her e-mail address is lvarner@seattletimes.com; for a podcast Q&A with the author, go to Opinion at seattletimes.com