Youth, hope, politics

Jenny Gardiner / Charlottesville Daily Progress
Published: April 14, 2008

For as long as I can remember, my now 17-year-old son has aspired to a career in politics. I have fretted often about his career choice, having worked in politics on Capitol Hill back in the ’80s, before the tone there turned irrevocably hostile.

“It’s a dirty business,” I’d tell him. “You’ll have to sell out, completely compromise your morals. I don’t want that for you.”

He’d usually shake his head and roll his eyes at me. Because this is his passion.

My son has engaged in political discourse from such an early age that by now he can recite the names of all of our lawmakers, from local to national positions, and can state their duties, their election cycles and their political positions. He even knows who’s the head of the Department of Game and Inland Fisheries. He can argue the finer points of issues from those as minute as local water use to those affecting people from far-flung corners of the globe. And he’ll quote you the exact date upon which he is eligible to run for Congress.

To my ongoing dismay, he regularly watches Fox News so he can be conversant and educated in the arguments of those with whom he disagrees.

He’s energized in mock government activities and participates wholeheartedly in Model United Nations. He believes in the vitality of our Constitution, adheres to the lessons of history and harbors hope and unabated promise for our country’s future, when for me, such optimism has given way to fatalism and ennui.

My son was invited to spend two weeks last summer with the Sorensen Institute for Political Leadership, an organization that seeks to improve political leadership in Virginia and strengthen the quality of governance throughout the nation. As we prepared to drop our son off at the University of Virginia for this course, I still sadly clung to the notion that politics in America are beyond redemption.

But listening to the institute’s communications director, Coy Barefoot, explain at the orientation the core notion of the group, my hardened cynicism began to melt away.

Sorensen leaders hope to encourage future leaders to play nice, act with dignity and do what’s in the best interest of the country, not a political party or corporation. Lofty goals? You bet. Idealistic? Even more so.

And after listening to 10 short minutes with Mr. Barefoot, I left feeling a renewed sense of optimism that all is not lost in our country, and that with enough people with integrity fanning out from the grassroots on up, perhaps down the road the politics of positive change for the better can ultimately take hold and blossom.

After witnessing the near-miraculous level of camaraderie achieved among those 30 bright, diverse and highly politically impassioned students, I was left feeling almost, well, optimistic.

Because while by day these students apparently expressed very vocally their opinions on all sorts of issues, by night they hung out as friends, got into mischief as teens are wont to do, and forged bonds that will likely help to define them as adult political leaders one day.

Their formal presentations at week’s end reflected a willingness to yield to one another in the interest of the bigger good. That’s something you don’t see much anymore.

I am saddened that my and my parents’ generations put the nails in the coffin of civility in politics in our country. But now I hold out hope that maybe our children’s generation can find the right crowbar with which to pry open the lid again. Sure, they might find a dusty, decomposed cadaver in there, but maybe just enough molecules of cordiality and respectability in government will remain buried inside, enough that this generation can bring it back from near extinction.

Mr. Barefoot left us with the words of Thomas Jef-ferson before we left our children in his hands to learn how to be positive stewards of our government:

“Come forward, then, and give us the aid of your talents and the weight of your character towards the new establishment of democracy.” And in those words is the encouragement of our elders to do whatever we can to strengthen what our forefathers so bravely carved for us.

I hold hope that future generations will heedfully mind the words of Mr. Jefferson as they take back our democracy and right it for the future of our country, even if it happens ever so gradually, with one idealistic kid at a time.

Jenny Gardiner is the author of “Sleeping with Ward Cleaver” and an essayist on WVTF-FM. She welcomes comments from readers at
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