This convention is the biggest darn thing to happen in Denver, ever. A small army of volunteers is putting in hundreds of thousands of hours to make this Convention happen and show off Denver at its best.
Down by the Pepsi Center it is completely insane and exhilarating at the same time, but around the suburbs where I hang out, there is an even more remarkable phenomena:
Democracy has become hip.
After my first day of volunteering as a VIP driver for the DNC (sorry, I can't share any of the juicy bits as we drivers were asked to keep confidential any gossip we learned), I stopped into my local Starbuck's for my usual sustaining venti/iced-tea/black/no-sugar/no-water. The 20-something behind the counter saw my volunteer t-shirt (hard to miss, being a lovely shade of Traffic Cone Orange) and told me how excited she was to be able to vote for president this year. She wasn't sure who was running exactly, but she intended to find out!
A young man I encountered on one of my VIP drop-offs came up to me out of the blue and asked, "So is Obama a Democrat? What about Hillary? What about McCain?" Basic, naive questions, but at least he was asking them, said he was considering going to register to vote, and was actively seeking out more information.
Some say we live in a "low-information" society, which may be true, but what is also true is that most of today's young people are used to having information at their fingertips via Google, and are not afraid to ask questions.
Voting is the only real sacrament of our democracy. I encouraged both of these young adults to go vote, but I also explained how they should consider the issues and the information they got from each candidate's websites, and not necessarily rely on the ads they saw on TV, which were often misleading. I don't know if they will take that advice to heart, but I was very touched by their enthusiasm.
We need to make voting at 18 a rite of passage just like getting a driver's license is at age 16. Encourage the young people around you to register, vote, and learn about the issues. If your child or niece or nephew is away at college, help them figure out how to vote absentee.
Let's not let them drift into adulthood without becoming full participants in our democracy.