Washington DC might lower the voting age to 16

I thought this would be an idea so stupid that only California would embrace it, but DC has it's share of stupid ideas as well.  Lowering the voting age to sixteen won't get kids more civically involved, it'll just prove that kids don't know enough to make an informed decision. Oh sure, if you lean to the left you'll love the idea, because kids lean leftward too. It's partially because kids don't know how the real world works, and it's also because they are easily influenced by their friends, who also don't know how the real world works. There is a lot of sad truth in the old saying, commonly but mistakenly attributed to Churchill, that "a man who is not a liberal in his twenties has no heart while a man who is not a conservative in his forties has no brain." It's over simplified of course-yes, liberals can be intelligent and yes conservatives can have compassion, but for me and many others it's been more or less true.

What's sadder to me is that forty years ago, even ardent liberals would see what a terrible idea this would be. Kids don't know how the real world works, you didn't at 16, I didn't at 16, and no one did. The folly of youth is that we think we know how the real world works. Hopefully when we get older, we see how wrong we were.