Millennial Helplessness: Why Are Young Voters Abandoning Their Political Destiny?

What does one vote do to change the outcome of a broken system? This is not my government. These are not my leaders.

This is the internal narrative dominating the thoughts of most millennials, regarding our bought and sold politicians that represent primarily corporate interests. Midterms are less than three weeks away. Three out of four 18-29 year-olds are expected to stay home, rather than vote. These numbers alone could flip the Senate to Republican control.

Learned Helplessness

In the 1960s, Dr. Martin Seligman, Director of the Positive Psychology Center at U Penn, experimented to discover animal responses toward adversity. The psychologist electrocuted restrained dogs to observe how the shocks would impact the animals' willpower. He found the same dogs, when placed in a different environment - no longer tied down and tortured - did not attempt to escape the administered electrocutions, even though they now could.

He coined this behavior learned helplessness. It stems from the attitude that
effort does not equal outcome, the belief one has no control over aspects of their life, a victimization both real and imagined. This fixed mindset, characteristic of miserablists, is venom to personal and environmental growth - if the next revolution is behavioral evolution, as some say.

The millennials (along with everyone else) have been shocked by the decade or so of events following 9/11 that make up our working memory about what it means to be a citizen in the US. We witnessed rogue bankers go untried after crashing the economy, international carbon declarations stay unsigned, whistleblowers become enemies of the state, and drones get dropped on multiple Middle Eastern countries, all under the reign of the same Nobel Peace Prize-winning President we quit our jobs to campaign for.

Many feel there are no candidates worth voting for. Studies also show, the majority of Americans have no idea how the many moving parts in our government actually work.

Watching the news makes us feel helpless. Paying off debt from for-profit universities, while working for $10/hour, spending $3.55 per gallon of gas, makes us feel feel helpless. And politics are supposed to be the vehicle to amend all this.

It's not just the government we Millennials exhaustedly write off. A poll by Harvard shows we harbor historically low distrust in every national, mixed-bag institution erected in theory to serve the people. The mass media, the NSA, the Military Industrial Complex, Wall Street - your power seems indomitable from the young people on the outside, your intentions opaque.

This all feels insane.

More: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/alison-sher/millennial-helplessness-young-voters_b_5991996.html?utm_hp_ref=politics&ir=Politics

Millennial Helplessness: Why Are Young Voters Abandoning Their Political Destiny?

Millennial Helplessness: Why Are Young Voters Abandoning Their Political Destiny?

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