Apathy

It's odd, I suppose. I'm sitting in my British History class, and were starting on our topic on Consensus Politcs. The teacher asks how many of us are definatly going to vote - 9 out of 17. The teacher asks how many are probably going to vote. 2 out of 17. That's a voting percent of 64%, 2% more than the US election (thanks LDV!) but when we got onto why the ones who were not going to vote.

"Well, they're both the same."

I place my head in my hands and contemplate throwing myself out of the window. We carry on. Three people (myself included) know the name of the Lib Dem leader. We discuss more about why people are disinterested in politics.

"I don't really have any political opinions."

The cop-out arguement comes into play. It's meaningless, and usually comes from people that would vote for Lib Dems or the Greens if they got it all explained to them. My sister is one of them. It's a puzzling development of mankind that some people are just hostile to poltics in general. You have your chance to change your life and you let it pass you by. I can't understand it. The crucial question is: How can we, as Lib Dems, give these people political opinions? We're not the party of brainwashing or "vote-camping". We should be telling these people about all the parties.

The big question mark for me is the outright hostility of the youth to politics. I must investigate.

1 comments:

Jennie Rigg said...

People in general think that even if they work their socks off in politics, they are very unlikely to make a difference. Experience tells them that one vote will not make a huge difference in a ward of thousands of people. They are behaving perfectly rationally.