Apathy: A War at Home?

Nov. 8, 2006 — -- When 26-year-old Sgt. Zack Bazzi returned from serving in the National Guard in Iraq to finish school at the University of New Hampshire in Durham, the student attitudes on campus distressed him.

Many young people, while respectful of his service abroad, had limited knowledge about what was going on overseas, he said. His frustration mounted when students created more of an uproar over changes to an online social network than they did about the war in Iraq or global warming.

"More college kids are knowledgeable about [the Internet networking service] Facebook than they are about others their age who are fighting and dying in Iraq," said Bazzi, who spent a year patrolling the roads of Iraq to protect military supply trucks from improvised explosive devices and insurgent attacks.

"I would hate to tell those veterans that there are kids your age more concerned about Facebook than they are about you."

Bazzi is one of many soldiers who are fighting and even dying to instill democracy in the Middle East, only to come home to find that an overwhelming number of their peers don't exercise their right to vote.

In the last midterm election, 22 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds voted, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. In the 2004 presidential elections, voter turnout for this age group was 47 percent.

"People should keep in mind that it would be disrespectful to their service men and women to not participate in government," said Bazzi, a Lebanese-American who was also one of three National Guardsmen featured in the award-winning documentary "The War Tapes."

"Regardless of your political affiliation, you should go out and vote so leaders know what their public wants."

But for Scott Erwin, a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford who traveled to Iraq in 2003 with the Department of Defense to teach University of Baghdad students about democracy, a representative government is not just about voting.

"What's far more important are the responsibilities associated with democracy, including civic participation, development of a civic society and being informed about issues," Erwin said. "I hesitate to say that [U.S.] students are apathetic. If you look at students today, they are heavily involved in the fabric of our society."