so that's what he meant....:
Posted on 07/21/2009 12:07:21 AM PDT by neverdem
Marking to read more later.
The start of the article loses me immediately.
The voting age wasn’t lowered due to psychologists: it was lowered due to the draft. Asking people to fight at the age of 18, regardless, meant that they should have a vote in what they were fighting for.
Wireplay is correct. If you’re old enough to fight and die for your country you should be allowed to vote.
so that's what he meant....:
“Virtually no one ‘wises up’ and becomes a Leftist”
Ha! This tickled me.
It’s a thought-provoking read, but I’m WAY past sick of the “It can’t happen here” bullsh*t.
So many on the right are convinced of this WHILE WE’RE IN THE MIDST OF TRYING TO STAVE OF SOCIALIZED MEDICINE!
Too much confidence, or evidence of a patriotic bromide, for this man’s comfort.
Our U.S. Armed Forces are voluntary now. If you're not a member of the U.S. Armed Forces, you shouldn't be voting until at least 25 years old, if not older. Look at who the young knuckleheads elected.
The author may not have fully represented the social and political pressure behind the reasons the voting age was lowered when it was — but I can say that I myself was nearing 18 at the time, and this made lively discussion in our home.
My elder brother and sister were in favor of the change, neither one being subject to the draft do to their educational status and technical college majors (although calling up my elder brother would have been a great thing, I believe - it would might have made a man out of him).
My high school graduate parents both argued against the change (my army veteran dad had been a firm Democrat until George Wallace came along and then supported his independent candidacy), and their reasoning was very much like the ones cited in this article, except that they used words like social and politcal “maturity,” rather than refering to brain scan activity. I believe they were correct, and I even believed it when I was 16 and 17, and took their side in the arguments in our house. Of course it was fun, too, telling my brother and sister that they were too immature to vote.
This was in the San Francisco Bay Area, by the way, and in the hippie—anti-war era, too. When I looked around at my high school classmates, I figured then that this was a bad decision — to lower the voting age. I was one of very few in school that would voice anti-McGovern comments — I was parroting my dad.
The car-rental and accident statistics illustrations are very good, and Congress would have been wise to pay more attention to these things.
Actually, the first presidential candidate I got to vote for was Gerald Ford. But I still feel that I understood very little, relatively, my maturity in the issues was too lacking, until my wife and I stood in line in 1980 to vote for our beloved Mr. Reagan. At that time I was already 24, and my wife 23, and I had spent 6-1/2 years in the U.S. Air Force.
I would favor raising the voting age back to 21, but it will never happen until the modern hippies who follow people like Obama have voted in our complete national destruction.
Well, I agree with that. I would like to go back to the original Constitution but I am apparently a freak of law.
My dad joined the Army when he was 14, does that grant him the vote?
That's the way it was sold. But the fact is that while being 18 means you can hold a gun and shoot it where you are told, it does not follow that you have the capability to judge what should be shot at.
Btw, the draft ended about that same time, but the voting age was lowered anyway. Which tells me that this selling point was just that, and not the real reason.
Then laws created by that government only pertain to veterans and property owners.
I think most young people would be willing to raise the voting age in exchange for the drinking age to be lowered.
I don’t think subjecting a large portion of the population which has reached the age of majority and committed no crime to an oligarchical rule is the solution to the problem.
Agreed.
Arlen Specter and Jim Jeffords come to mind.
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