Ask any retailer who employs young people and he will tell you how unconcerned for the future the under-30 crowd really is. I have hired hundreds and hundreds of employees in my 55 years of working in the retail trade (since I was 8 years old) and I have to tell you that most young people do not worry or think about their future. I exclude those young who have a family and a job and rent or mortgage payments but those who do not have a financial responsibility certainly have no pressure to actually worry about the future.

My experience has been that under-30 employees who do not fear job loss becasue they have no concern for the future are more careless, more tardy, and more unreliable. For example, at Christmas time I often have to hire extra help. If by circumstance I am forced to hire young people I give them a warning that they are forbidden to go out and party during the entire month of December because I know that if a young person goes out on a Friday night they will often call in sick the next day because they are too bummed out to work whereas an elderly employee will still come to work even if she is run over by a forklift.

Anyone who thinks the majority of young people actually worry about the future has not dealt with any number of them in situations where their future is at stake. Go online and check the insurance rates for any 2008 sports car. Put in an age of 24 and then for 54. The 24 year old, despite better coordination, eyesight, response times, etc. will have a much higher premium than that of an older person. Why is that? I'll tell you what insurance companies know: young drivers are reckless. Do you know why they are reckless? Because they cannot see into a future in which they are dead. They are invulnerable. The same sentiment makes many, not all, young folk discount the danger of Islamic terror or worry about the consequences of voting for a socialist.

The young, even if they know in their heart that Obama is a socialist, don't care. They have no idea what the consequences are. The older adults who voted for Obama, since they know what the consequences are, pretend to themselves that he's not really a socialist, just like the many Germans who closed their eyes and voted for Hitler because of his promise of CHANGE. Blacks of course would have voted for Obama even if he were a clansman. Yes, my dear readers, there are people who hold their noses while they vote (like I did) and those who close their eyes.

But back to young people. It is a well-known fact that they cannot abide older folks joining Myspace or Facebook:

news.com.au, 29 Jan 2008, Youngsters not happy oldies going online

Lauren Auster-Gussman, a university student, says it is particularly awkward when one of her parents' friends asks to join her social network.

She thinks Facebook should only be used by people younger than, say, 40.

Young people do not read newspapers. Period. And until newspapers start running more stories on sex, drugs and rock-and-roll they'll never get young readers. Most newspapers have stories about mortgage rates, financial matters, security, wars, conflicts, immigration problems, etc. You know, things that old people worry about.

Young people have excellent hearing yet play their music loud. Old people who can hardly hear fire engines crossing the street play their music low. Students are using a new ring tone to receive messages in class — and older teachers can't even hear the ring. What has this got to do with my position that most young have no concern for the future? Well, have you ever warned a young person with earphones blasting into his ears that he or she will go deaf? Didn't the warning fall on deaf ears? For the young, the future is too far off to worry about.

If anyone doubts that this election turned on the youth vote consider this info from CNN Election Center 2008: So far, Obama has gotten 65,139,550 votes, McCain only 57,192,255. CNN estimates that 18% of them (or 22,019,725 voters) were age 18-29 of whom 66 percent voted for Barack (14,533,019 votes) and 32 percent for McCain (7,046,312 votes).

Let's do the math. If we remove the votes of the under-30 crowd from both candidates we have,
for Obama: 65,139,550 minus 14,533,019 equals 50,606,531
for McCain: 57,192,255 minus 7,046,312 equals 50,145,943

Thus Obama would have had only 460,588 more popular votes than McCain. To put that in perspective, in the 2000 election Al Gore received 543,895 more popular votes than George Bush but still lost in electoral votes.

Although the popular vote is not decisive of anything, we can see how close the race really would have been without the youth vote.

Yes, young people are the future, but young people should not be the ones to set the volume level for the rest of us to listen to. Do I think young people should vote? Not if they don't have a job or a family. And to be fair, neither should retired people. In this way, those who do not work, can not vote for programs that suck the blood out of those who do.