Internet biggest obstacle to youth involvement in politics
No greater deterrent exists to youth involvement in politics than the current obsession with who said what or did what on the Internet.
Thestar.com
Sept. 15, 2015
By Emma Teitel
Would you pee into a coffee mug? And if that coffee mug belonged to a complete stranger, would you rinse it out in his or her kitchen sink sans dish soap?
Thanks to a federal election rife with bizarre scandal, these questions have been weighing on my mind lately. And I’ve come to an uncomfortable conclusion.
It’s (remotely) possible that I, too, like Jerry Bance, the former Conservative candidate and former contractor caught urinating into a homeowner’s coffee mug on CBC’s Marketplace in 2012, might urinate one day in the wrong receptacle. Because like Bance and his contemporaries - Canadian political candidates who have erred on camera and online - I am a human being prone to strange stupidity.
Like Ala Buzreba, former Liberal candidate in the riding of Calgary-Nose Hill who recently resigned form her post after it was revealed she made offensive comments on Twitter as a teen, I have written questionable things in a public forum.
Like Katherine Swampy, an NDP candidate running in Alberta’s Battle River-Crowfoot riding, I have posted numerous regrettable photos and statements on Facebook. Swampy is in the hot seat this month for explicit comments she made on Facebook in 2011 and an Instagram photo - also outdated - in which her husband is seen pointing a gun the NDP has since claimed is a toy.
Mind you, unlike former Toronto-Danforth Conservative candidate Tim Dutaud (who, like Bance and Buzreba, has also dropped out of the race) I have never faked an orgasm on YouTube in the name of comedy. But tomorrow is another day.
It appears this election campaign is inextricably linked to a series of technology-driven scandals. And these scandals are disturbing not because they reveal a gross or grossly immoral streak in the political candidates involved, but because they foretell instant doom for anyone under the age of 30 who would like to get into politics.
Millennials - boomerang kids, ingrates, whatever the current term is for people aged 18-33 - are not universally prone to peeing in the wrong places and tweeting obscenities.
But considering that our digital trail was spawned in pre-adolescence, chances are that at least one of us has done one or more of these things (and worse) at some point, and that these indiscretions have been preserved, like dinosaur DNA, for eternity.
From where I sit, no greater deterrent exists to youth involvement in politics than the current obsession with who said what or did what on the Internet, especially when you said or did it in a fifth dimension Bizarro world - i.e. high school.
Couldn’t a 20-something would-be prime minister purge incriminating material of herself from the Internet? I recently found a video on Facebook, in which I am obviously drunk, and attempting to sing a Dubstep remix of a Hilary Duff song - a video I had no idea existed (maybe because I don’t remember it happening), a video I have tried and failed to erase, repeatedly.
Missteps like Swampy’s and Buzreba’s will likely increase tenfold when younger generations start running for politics.
The difference though, is that when they do, good candidates - not just nutty fringe ones - will have to step away from promising careers for no other reason than that they are normal people with social lives and an Internet connection. Which is a shame because none of us, save for the truly prudish, partisan or humourless, is genuinely incensed when someone makes a stupid mistake in a public forum - a mistake that injures no one but him or herself (except in the case of Jerry Bance and the homeowner who, let us pray, did not drink out of that mug).
We could hope, of course, that there are so many Internet-driven scandals in the future that they cancel each other out; when everyone’s dirty laundry is waving in the air it’s imprudent to tell the person next to you he smells bad. But in case they don’t, I’d like to propose a new system whereby we judge candidates not by their past mistakes but by the nature of their repentance. Given the opportunity to make things right, do they apologize sincerely and even gracefully, or do they prove to be as clueless and obnoxious as their initial sins indicated?
Are they contrite, or do they double down the same way disgraced Hydro One employee, Shawn Simoes of #FHRITP notoriety did? Chances are, had Simoes apologized immediately after City reporter Shawna Hunt called him out for being a boor, instead of suggesting she was lucky she didn’t have a vibrator in her ear, his public shaming would not have been nearly as devastating, nor deserved.
Whether we like to admit it or not, clean slates are extinct. Here’s to second chances.
