In 1967, Marshall McLuhan, the media guru, wrote a book titled "The Medium Is the Massage." I had the pleasure of hearing McLuhan speak in the early 1970s at Canisius College. It's almost hard to believe today that his perplexing and prophetic proclamations regarding the technological age of information remain disturbingly clear and amazingly accurate almost four decades later. Politics has become purely technological.

We no longer get our information from stump speeches or fireside chats. We are bombarded daily by slick, paid political advertising that provides us with only tidbits of sound byte rhetoric. Propaganda has invaded all possible airwaves. But when it's all said and done, we as citizens still have to decide how to vote.

It is no wonder that so many of us decide to stay home on Election Day. Heads are spinning from all the rhetoric; we're too dizzy even to drive to the polls. Technology's speed has taken a huge element out of our lives – we no longer think about things like we did years ago. We no longer use our imaginations as we did before. Rapid-fire information saturation has replaced our old paradigm of sitting down and pondering the issues. The twenty four-hour Internet news cycle has stripped us of our ability to sit down and assess which individual may best represent us and our beliefs.

We have lost faith in the system because, quite honestly, we're not quite sure what the system is anymore. It has changed so rapidly in this technological age of ours that we find it difficult to trust what we see and hear. This is not human, it is static. Ironically, the media coming at us at lighting speed has the tendency to lock our minds in a certain position. When I was growing up as a child, once in awhile, my father would say "children should be seen and not heard," which was a polite way of saying that there are two worlds out there, one for the adults and one for the children. Today's children do not have that separation. They are attuned daily to the up-to-the-minute adult news of war, riots, taxes, crime, and sex, stuff that we used to have to filter out through the use of our imaginations.

Unfortunately, it seems that through this technology, the kids today have lost the ability to think creatively. Something else is doing their thinking for them. And they don't vote. So the question becomes: how do we re-engage the youngest among us who move at telekinetic speed into a political process that seems so hopelessly out of touch?

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