How to eliminate clueless voters
November 19, 2010
wnd.com
I was happy to see Ann Coulter's recent article about the need to repeal the 26th Amendment, as preventing immature young adults from voting is something I have long advocated. In some ways, it's more harmful than the 14th Amendment, whose misinterpretation encourages ready-to-deliver Mexican women to scamper across our southern border and give birth to freshly minted U.S. citizens.
In her article, Coulter focuses on research done over the past five years that has shown that human brains are not fully developed until age 25 and are particularly deficient in their frontal lobes until then. This is important, she says, because the frontal lobes control decision-making, rational thinking, judgment, and the ability to plan ahead and resist impulses.
My mind harkens back to the Barack Obama of the 1960s, who ran against an incumbent president, Lyndon Johnson, for the Democratic nomination in 1968. That particular version of Barack Obama went by the name of Robert F. Kennedy (RFK).
Kennedy was a corrupt and dangerous man who, like all Kennedys, lived his life by one set of rules while insisting that others live by rules he deemed to be right for them. Had he not been assassinated, RFK undoubtedly would have been elected president (especially considering that incumbent Lyndon Johnson decided not to run again) and probably would have succeeded in transforming the U.S. into a full-fledged socialist country decades before Barack Obama came on the scene.
Kennedy was considered a champion of that greatest of all political scams, "social justice." Of course, there is no such thing as social justice in the absolute sense of the term. That's why such an abstract concept can only be implemented by force, which in turn requires iron-fisted leaders with such melancholy names as Mao Zedong, Josef Stalin, Fidel Castro and Ho Chi Minh.
While RFK, like Obama, attracted left-wing radicals from many sectors of society, the group I most identify with him is young adults. The kids who voted for BHO in 2008 are two generations removed from Bobby Kennedy's adoring, youthful supporters, but, like their predecessors, they, too, got caught up in the save-the-planet, anti-business, spread-the-wealth hysteria.
As Coulter points out, voters 18 to 29 years of age voted in favor of Obama by a whopping 66-31 percentage spread. And since they comprised 20 percent of the number of people who voted, they were able to put a social-justice guy into the White House whose policies are guaranteed to destroy their own futures.
Why would young adults who, for the most part, are reasonably intelligent and college educated, do such a self-destructive thing? Because, as we now know, the brain is not fully developed until age 25 – meaning that Obama's ascendancy to the power throne was made possible by millions of young adults whose brains were not even physiologically capable of making rational decisions!
Voting for people to govern other human beings is, at best, a questionable and corrupt activity – an activity that is all about lies, smear campaigns, money, pandering, bribery and thugs trying to intimidate voters with nightsticks. But if we must elect officials to govern us, I would go much further than just repealing the 26th Amendment.
I'd like to see an amendment that would require voters to be at least 30 years of age. Even though research indicates that the brain is fully developed by age 25, you have to give a newly formed adult brain a reasonable period of time to experience enough life to be in a position to shed itself of the bad habits it has developed over a period of 25 years. This is particularly true if a young adult has gone to college and been fed large doses of misinformation about history, economics and the Constitution.
Admittedly, some people are mature enough to vote at 18, while others are too immature to vote at 40. Life is imperfect, so, unfortunately, arbitrary judgments cannot always be avoided. But the one thing I can say with certainty is that 30 is light years ahead of 18 when it comes to knowledge, wisdom and common sense.
That, however, is not where I'd stop. I'd also like to see a constitutional amendment passed that would disqualify government employees and people receiving government benefits from voting. They have too much of a direct financial interest in the outcome of the voting process, as is evidenced by the fact that the average government salary is about $72,000 a year versus roughly $50,000 for the average private-sector worker.
A person with such a vested financial interest in the outcome of elections cannot reasonably be expected to vote for politicians who understand that the Constitution does not give the government the right to redistribute wealth. And since congresspersons make more than three times the latter amount and are in a position to vote themselves endless benefits and perks, they, too, should be disqualified from voting.
I would make an exception for Social Security recipients for now, because that's a program that was literally forced upon the entire population, and people have been misled into believing that they have "paid into the system." Hopefully, Social Security ultimately will be phased out, in which case it would no longer be an issue.
By contrast, kids who join the military do so by choice, a choice they are not mature enough to make. In any event, it doesn't make them any more capable of making rational choices when it comes to voting.
That said, I would be happy if Congress would just take the first step and revoke the voting rights of impressionable kids who are still engrossed in tree-hugging, the romanticizing of Che Guevera and other embarrassingly immature activities. As Voltaire warned, "Men will stop committing atrocities when men stop believing absurdities." And, for the most part, men (and women) tend to believe many more absurdities before their brains are fully developed. |
