Politics needs a makeover: a splash of excitement coupled with youthful energy and ideas.
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I’ve asked many young people in Philadelphia, and some older ones, their opinions on local political stories that impact their lives. More often that not, I’m told: “I don’t do politics… it’s boring.”
Now, while I don’t condone ignoring the political apparatus of government, I agree that politics is perceived as boring, and even worse, inherently corrupt.
As a journalist whose covered more protests than I can count, I’ve met numerous active citizens who I think could serve the public with dignity, pride, fairness and transparency. However, those individuals who I hold in high regard have no interest in elected office. In fact, most times they refer to the act of being a politician as “selling your soul.”
Again, I understand the perception, and the barrage of headlines that tell the stories of politicians who are being indicted, investigated or arrested for abusing the public’s trust doesn’t make it easier to convince people to engage the system in a meaningful way.
But in the same way – and warning, this will sound cliché – which we acknowledge not all police officers are bad after reading a story about an unarmed citizens being shot dead, we should extend the same grace to the political arena and not withdraw our participation just because of a few bad apples.
As a civilized society, we should be as motivated about promoting careers in public service to our youth as we are about engaging them into the 21st century, STEM-dominated workforce.
For example, on Monday, September 15th, 2014, at the University of Pennsylvania, Mayor Michael A. Nutter will announce the details for the US2020 PHL high-impact STEM mentoring model, which features an online STEM resource center and volunteer matching platform.
In May 2014, Philadelphia was selected as one of seven winning cities in the US2020 City Competition for STEM Mentorship, which challenged cities to develop innovative models for dramatically increasing the number of STEM professionals mentoring and teaching students through hands-on projects.
While this a great win for the city, and Philly as of late has been really championing the innovation ecosystem, one can’t ignore that outside of the City Council fellowship program – which only grants a handful of young Philadelphians a chance to see the day-to-day operation of city government –there’s no real exploratory options or mentoring pipeline that’ll increase the number of taxpayers who are exposed to the work of local legislators and therefore will consider it as a career.
Whether it’s by accident or design, it needs to be changed. Moreover, politics needs a makeover, a splash of excitement coupled youthful energy and ideas, especially in Philadelphia where more than a quarter of the population are millennials who are indifferent about politics, but avid about change.
Regardless of how we, as individuals, perceive the political structure, it’s not going anywhere, but it can be augmented to fit the times and citizen’s desires.
The changes we all want to see won’t happen just by talking, nor will materialize from simply voting in the two elections we have every year. It will, however, come to fruition once we the people acknowledge both the inherit flaws in the system and our responsibility in creating a more perfect union, together.
Thanks for reading. Until next time, I’m Flood the Drummer® & I’m Drumming for JUSTICE!™
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Photo: “CAVE CANEM”/Flickr
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