Part One:
THE PROBLEM IS NOT YOUTH APATHY. YOUNG PEOPLE MUST BE GIVEN BETTER ACCESS TO THE VOTE.
We welcome Abby Kiesa, Director of Impact at CIRCLE, Tufts University. She communicates research findings and tracks recommendations from young people regarding how to increase student involvement in public life, including exercising their right to vote.
15,000,000 students will become eligible to vote in 2020. We should not assume that all of them will actually go to the polls, or that all of them will vote for Democrats. (Fully one-third of younger voters in 2016 voted for Trump.)
We must do a better job of offering young people a civic education. In addition to math, science and literature classes, we must teach them what it means to live in a democracy, including why it’s important – and valuable *to them* – to engage in public issues, to make informed decisions about how their lives will be governed, to exercise the precious right to vote for government officials who will be making the rules for how our society operates.
In addition to showing our youth why they might want to make sure they vote, we must also teach them the basics of how they can get access. Where does one register to vote? In a time of COVID-19, are there safe ways to register, to gather information about competing candidates, to participate in campaigns of people they support? Will young voters want to join the current debate about how their state (or our country) will conduct the fall elections in a way that won’t require voters to sacrifice their health or their lives? Many options are being debated right now. Would this be a good time for young folks to get involved in civic issues, while they (and we) are “sheltering at home”?
Part Two:
WE’RE ALWAYS SPENDING MORE FOR OUR NATIONAL DEFENSE. ARE WE GETTING OUR MONEY’S WORTH?
Our second guest is Dan Spinelli, who covers national security for Mother Jones. We discuss politicians’ knee-jerk support for an ever-increasing Pentagon budget, with precious little scrutiny of the programs, weapons, or policy choices that are funded in that budget. As long as they’ve voted for increased spending on the “national defense,” politicians rarely spend time asking what we really mean by that term.
But is our national security served *only* by investing billions of dollars in perhaps outdated or ineffective (or over-priced) weapons systems? Isn’t the COVID-19 pandemic also a threat to our national security? Doesn’t global warming pose an existential threat to our country’s very survival? And should American taxpayers spend our hard-earned funds bailing out defense contractors when they produce defective products (like Boeing) or when they use their bloated profits to overcompensate their CEOs and investors?
