Youth trade sit-ins for seats

A story posted Friday at CdaPress.com reported a study of today's teens and young adults. The unsurprising conclusion: Young people are more confident, more entitlement-minded than their 1960s counterparts. They expect life to be better and easier than did the flower-power kids who revolted to demand it. "Generation Me" the story called them.

This isn't all bad. Yes, with some exceptions kids are a little more spoiled, a little more reticent to do the same scut work we considered a necessary dues payment. However, the study also found something positive: These kids volunteer more and possibly, longer. Their confidence, even if exaggerated, can be beneficial.

Confidence can encourage involvement; involvement leads to experience; and experience, to a more learned maturity. More young people voted in the last U.S. presidential election than were mobilized in the past. That could set a lifetime pattern.

Perhaps today the most eye-catching example lies to the north in Canada's parliament, where some of its newest members just passed voting age. The speaker himself is only 32, the youngest speaker in Canadian parliamentary history leading its youngest parliament.

A mixed blessing though it may be - a legislature is a risky place to cut one's teeth - with patience and help these "kids" can change their world. And they want to work together, a hopeful aspect in a politically charged body where gridlock is as much of a problem as it is here.

I'm not Pollyanna. These newly elected representatives of 19 to 24 years barely know the boundaries of their constituencies, let alone what the voters expect of them. They got elected by unusual political savvy exercised by Canada's Green Party. Using grant money to recruit youth, the party got a stronger reaction than was anticipated, and the voters surprised them by electing college kids with no experience into office (and a record-breaking number of women, now 25 percent). Moreover, for the first time in Canada, the Green Party has a majority in government, organized to coach their young in the ways of lawmaking as parliament opened this month.

This is the sort of power their grandparents only dreamed of - meaningful ability to effect change in the hands of the young. What would the flower power set think of this method of revolution? They criticized the "establishment;" these youth instead became part of it.

Will they get eaten alive by their more experienced counterparts in their legislature? Maybe, but this is where their confidence can kick in. The so-called "me" generation is less intimidated than were we, they know times are uncertain, and according to the study, they're more concerned with the world at large.

If we give them a chance, they just may surprise us.

Sholeh Patrick is an attorney and a columnist for the Hagadone News Network. Email [email protected]