Last week I began my columnizing quest to battle student voter apathy, and I was completely ready to editorialize about some other issue-oriented topic this week — until I walked into The Reveille’s office and right into a controversy.
I ran into someone wearing a retro T-shirt, decorated in red, white and blue. Normally I would have just passed this shirt off except I noticed large letters across the chest that read “Voting Is For Old People.”
Huh?
The shirt’s wearer, who shall remain anonymous, said he bought it from Urban Outfitters, a modern clothing store based out of Philadelphia, because he thought it was funny and he wanted to make fun of politically apathetic college students.
And maybe some people do find it funny. It certainly stirred up enough controversy to incite media coverage by many college newspapers and even that giant of pop culture, MTV.
Urban Outfitters released a statement to MTV on Feb. 17 defending their product: “‘Voting Is for Old People’ was, in fact, never meant to be misconstrued as an anti-voting T-shirt. We fully understand how this shirt might be misinterpreted and we appreciate the arguments that the shirt has raised.”
The designer of the shirt, John Foster Keddie, even told Newsday that the aim of his shirt was to show “the discord between young people and the political system.”
I was set to rant about how Urban Outfitters’ poking fun at youth voting apathy was effectively hurting its prime audience, but then someone clued me in to some facts on the issue.
Old people actually are the ones who vote — in record numbers, in fact.
More than 70 percent of registered voters aged 55 and older voted in the 2003 Louisiana gubernatorial election. Only a mere 32.6 percent of registered voters aged 21 to 34 who voted in that same election.
But how do you define “old?”
According to the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement at the University of Maryland’s Web site, 42 percent of citizens 18 to 24 voted in the 2000 presidential election — a little more than half the 70 percent of citizens older than 25 who voted.
So if you look at the facts, voting is overwhelmingly for old people.
And there is a reason for that; students are increasingly mobile which makes them a hard campaign demographic for political candidates.
In the past, apathy has proven to wain off after young people settle down, get married, have stable jobs and the like. But, if it is a fact of life that student voters will be apathetic, what are we going to teach our own children about the importance of becoming involved in the government in general?
Incidentally, Urban Outfitters pulled the shirts from their stores on March 5. Although this probably was a move to stay in the public’s good graces, Urban Outfitters was not at fault for trying to make a buck off a harmless T-shirt with some words printed on the front. We live in a country that prides itself on freedom of speech and freedom of expression, so the fact the T-shirt exists doesn’t seem to be the central problem to me.
The problem is how true the T-shirt’s message may turn out to be.
Every young American can walk around wearing “Voting Is For Old People” T-shirts, but by students becoming involved in the issues and government in general before we are “old,” we can make sure voting doesn’t go out like Urban Outfitters’ trendy shirt.