My eighteen-year-old son called me yesterday, and in the course of the conversation mentioned that he'd just voted...it was his first time, and when I.... My eighteen-year-old son called me yesterday, and in the course of the conversation mentioned that he'd just voted...it was his first time, and when I congratulated him, he said, a tad miffed, that of course he voted; he wasn't going to pass up the chance to have a say.

I didn't ask him how he voted, and I don't care. In a culture often based on irresponsibility, here's someone young and self-centered who nevertheless took on the joyful burden of the vote.

The truest act of adulthood in a democratic culture, the real coming of age, is not having sex or chilcdren or getting married, it is not engaging in work or making money or buying property--it is voting, because in voting you step outside yourself and join with your fellows to take on the reponsibility of shaping and managing an entire city, a state, the nation.

More power to him and to his fellows. I know many of his friends, and I suspect that most of them went to the polls.

Good thing, too. Somebody's got to, if we're to survive as a culture. Turnout in this California election (which included important and controversial--I'd say misguided--economic initiatives) was about 37% for LA County....