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Competitors? Well, what else can you call them? As politicians pander to nuclear (non-gay) families, the middle class, and the elderly, youth interests are consistently excluded from the mainstream political process. Certainly, there are cheery promises of increased Pell Grants and the occasional admission of recreational drug use during a candidate’s college years, but when all is said and done, politicians have little to offer the youth of America.

Take the issue of intellectual property law. Now, this may not sound very sexy, but copyright law is being used to ruin students’ lives. Using the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, record companies are suing college students who download MP3s for their life savings. Who is standing up for these victims of Big Media? Not the Republicans, and certainly not the Democrats. Both parties find it more important to support corporate America than to protect young Americans. The INDUCE Act is a bill that would make criminals of anyone who even encourages copyright infringement č think creators of file-sharing networks and manufacturers of high-capacity MP3 players. In a bipartisan effort, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist and outgoing Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle are sponsoring the bill that will destroy file-sharing as we know it and probably stifle technological innovation.

If copyright’s not your thing, consider your own education and financial well-being. How many of us will graduate with more than $20,000 in debt? As we try to make our way in the world and support ourselves in this less-than-ideal economic environment, will we be able to scrape by with the burden of high monthly student-loan payments? What will happen when our children are heading off to college and we’re still paying off our own loans? If the system isn’t fixed, it’s simply going to break down. And which party is really offering a concrete solution to the problem? Neither, of course.

It’s a classic chicken-and-egg problem: Do young voters not care about politics because politicians don’t care about them? Or is it the other way around? Either way, there’s only one way things are going to ever change. As Ralph Nader says: “Turn on to politics before politics turns on you.” If the youth of America do not strive to make themselves heard and to push their issues onto the national scene, we will continue to be marginalized and ignored.

If you feel that “moral values” and Medicare are the most important issues for America, then feel free to continue letting the religious right and old people determine our course as a nation. If not, then you’d better start getting geared up for 2006 and 2008, because politicians will never listen to us if we don’t make them.