Frost’s discussion of the fight for youth voting rights encapsulated many talking points about civil rights, democracy, protest and strength in diversity. What grabbed my attention the most, however, was one throw-away line in the middle of her lecture.
“Youth today is just not as young as it used to be” – Richard Nixon
Frost elaborated that the youth of the 1970s were more mature and educated than current voters were in their youth. This made me wonder whether this trend continued 50 years later.
This metric of ‘maturity’ is difficult to judge. At age 19, I am heavily involved in politics, human rights and global issues. Being raised with the internet at my fingertips, my access to knowledge is far greater than the previous generation’s; this densely informative age has definitely boosted my generation’s global/political maturity.
My grandmother was 19 in the year 1958. She was married, had taken a mortgage on a house, and relied on her job as a secretary in order to put food on the table. She was mature with her life experience, with her duties, with her responsibilities.
This only highlights another of Frost’s points – Maturity is subjective. There are a thousand different ways to measure maturity, and no one metric is a complete picture. Was my grandmother more mature than me at 19 years old? Sure, by some measures, but not all. At the age of 19, only one of us had a husband, and only one of us had been to a protest.
To bring this ramble back to my original point, is today’s youth more mature than yesterday’s? It depends on how you measure it.
Blumenthal, S. (2018, December 20). New Nixon and Youth Politics, 1968. Retrieved from https://www.processhistory.org/blumenthal-1968/
