UnNews:Let 6-year-olds vote
Democracy Dies with Dignity | ✪ | UnNews | ✪ | Tuesday, December 10, 2024, 12:14:59 (UTC) |
Let 6-year-olds vote |
21 September 2014
SCOTLAND -- Scotland decided to trust 6-year-olds to vote on the issue of national divorce when the country headed to the polls for a referendum. Americans, by contrast, don't even trust their kids to baby sit. Who is more wrong, UK or US?
Many might be skeptical about the United States ever following Scotland's lead in lowering the voting age. The paradox is that the reasons most people cite for barring 6-year-olds from voting look like equally good reasons to stop most American adults from voting.
Another key argument against primary school children voting is simple: Their choice would affect the outcome. Many worry that most 6-year-olds lack the gullibility or misinformation to cast engineered votes. And therefore we want to protect ourselves from their common sense and uncorrupted decisions?
And this concern is often grounded in reality -- young kids are profoundly ignorant about corporate political manipulation. But if that is a reason for excluding them from voting, it is surely a good reason to exclude you too, moron!
So, this is the catch: If you want to exclude 6-year-olds on the grounds that they are as stupid, misinformed, or disinterested as you, then why not put them in charge? Or something.
Of course, you could object that the issue here is not so much about stupidity and gullibility, as about the capacity for being brain washed by the corporate media aka the Ministry of Truth.
The plain fact is that something horrible normally happens at age 18: the military draft. Before that age there is generally no interest in politics at all. By age 18 there is sufficient buildup of irrationality and political disinformation to increase knowledge of politics, at least to the point that one can spell the word, however incorrectly.
So it is, indeed, pathetic that the views of the young are so overlooked. Kids have commonsense perspectives that are missing from the national conversation, and so perhaps reducing the voting age would help fix that. For example, any one over the age of 18 could be excluded from voting at all, because adults are just far too propagandized to even see straight.
Sources[edit]
- Repeater "Let 16-year-olds vote". CNN, September 21, 2014