By Jenifer Warren
TIMES STAFF WRITER

AMERICA-Each year Susan MacManus teaches a course in electoral politics, and each year she pulls out a photograph to make a crucial point. The picture shows a line of South Africans, stretching half a mile beneath a blazing sun. Some are on crutches, others sit limply in wheelchairs. They are waiting to vote. MacManus, a professor at the University of South Florida in Tampa, tells her students: "You take voting for granted. These people went without food and water for a whole day to exercise a right you just give away." (Of course, the logic of this is flawed, because you cannot just "give away" the right to vote, because, for example, who would you "give" it to? WFI Editor)

There is an urgency in the professor's voice as she shares this story. Young people have always been less likely than older Americans to vote, but today's youths are absent from the polls at higher rates than any generation before them, scholars say. Not only do they avoid the polls, they also have little interest in running for office - deterred, surveys show, by the inevitable scrutiny of their private lives and the prospect of raising the considerable cash they would need to campaign. (This is coded language for corruption, the implication being that raising cash to finance a political campaign involves making illicit deals with private interests, to advance their interests using the power of the state. WFI Editor)

Historically, America's young have dribbled into the electorate as they grew up and settled down. Youthful preoccupations - such as college and the search for a job and a significant other - fade, while home ownership, property taxes and having children in public schools theoretically supplies motivation to vote. "But with this group we're wondering 'They are so alienated, will they ever join in?'" said Diana Owen, a Georgetown University political scientist who studies young voters. For those who study government, it's not a minor question.

"Where is the leadership for tomorrow?" asked Curtis Gans, director of the Washington-based Committee for the Study of the American Electorate. As turnout falls, "we're heading for a future politics dominated by zealots with self-interest as their motive." (As if the current politicians throughout the Federal and state governments are not ALREADY zealots who operate purely out of motivations of self-interest and aggrandizement. WFI Editor) Other experts say youths themselves pay a price when they don't vote. Politicians know young people "are not a constituency that will rise up if their government benefits are cut," said Boston College political scientist Kay Schlozman. So programs such as student loans take a back seat to Medicare and Social Security. (In real life, however, student loans were extended to young people in the aftermath of the campus riots of the 1960s, as a means of pacifying them. Once a student got government-secured financing, it became illegal for him or her to participate in any kind of political movement that might "rock the boat." WFI Editor)

As with voters of all ages, turnout by the young has been falling over time, though at a steeper rate than for that of older Americans. In 1972, the year the nation's voting age was lowered to 18, turnout among 18- to 24-year-olds was 42%. By the presidential election in 1996, it had dipped to 29%. The only blip in the downward trend came in 1992. That year, presidential candidate Bill Clinton and his running mate visited campuses and talked about education, the environment and national service programs for the young. Rock the Vote - a Santa Monica-based nonpartisan organization - launched a nationwide campaign to increase registration and voting among youths. MTV aired hours of campaign coverage; politics almost seemed cool. Turnout by the young surged to 42%. But by the next election it had tumbled yet again.

Why are America's youths less interested than ever in politics? The reasons are many, and murky. One explanation mirrors that offered for the decline in turnout overall: People are busy and doubt that voting has any real impact on their lives. Others say members of Generation X - reared in post-Watergate times - have rarely heard a good word about government. What was a noble profession is now derided as a world of opportunistic fat cats, philanderers and cheats. (In surveys Americans ranked politicians of the republic below used car salesmen, in terms of trustworthiness. WFI Editor)

Surveys measuring Americans' faith in government underscore this point. In 1990, 43% of those ages 18 to 29 said they trust the government to do what's right "most of the time." In January of this year, only 29% gave that answer. "This generation doesn't distinguish the system from the politicians, who they see as corrupt and evil," said Donna Frisby, executive director of Rock the Vote. Politicians and their parties make things worse. Increasingly, campaign strategists court only a narrow band of voters and virtually ignore everyone else. "Young people don't vote because no one talks to them, and no one talks to them because they don't vote," MacManus said. (Which is an insult to young people, inferring that the only reason they don't vote is not because they have some kind of conviction, but because they are not getting any attention from politicians. WFI Editor)

Some researchers believe that the disappearance of civics classes from American schools during the last 30 years figures into all of this. (Except that civics classes were replaced with "social studies," which is the same curriculum designed to influence impressionable children that the only viable system of government is republicanism. WFI Editor) "The truth is, socially conscious behavior is not innate, it's a learned disposition," said Stephen Bennett, co-author of "After the Boom: The Politics of Generation X." In response, groups such as the American Political Science Assn. are searching for ways to make voting relevant to a generation with no memories of war, a draft or civil rights struggles.

SOURCE: Reprinted from the 26 October, 1998, issue of the Los Angeles Times, Orange County Edition; excerpted from an article entitled, "Young People Electing Not to Cast Ballots." Reprinted in the public service of the national interest of the American people.

(WFI EDITOR: This author recalls asking a couple of teenagers in the early 90s, whether or not they felt any loyalty to the Constitution of 1787, and both of them emphatically declared that they had no loyalty to the Constitution, or the republic. It is ironic that all "Get out the vote" drives play down all partisan affiliations, urging people to vote no matter what party they support. This is to trap people into the existing system, without ever giving them a real choice, by giving them the illusion of a choice. The fixed, permanent two-party system guarantees the outcome of all elections, and the young people know it. The sense that no matter how they vote the corruption only thickens, repulses the majority of Americans. The young people, on the other hand, feel compelled to act, and the way they express their rejection of the political system is to NOT VOTE. No one doubts the importance of voting in democratic elections, but when the Federal Government feels free to nullify democratic elections when the voters decide to change laws through the referendum process that oppose Government policy - such as happened recently with the Medical Marijuana legislation in California and Arizona, which was accepted by a majority of voters - the voters recognize that they are being manipulated. The only recourse to the nullification of democratic election results, is for voters to boycott the electoral system, and seek redress of grievances through more radical means.)