So Obama won the Iowa caucuses in large part because a lot of under-30 voters turned out and they went for him overwhelmingly. The moment I heard this I thought about my visit to the University of Arizona a couple of months ago to do some lectures and workshops. I spoke to a freshman honors class, 30 or so fresh-faced 18-year-olds,  and later to an assembly of several hundred of the same, some of whom milled around me after the lecture to chatt about this and that. In the class that morning, we got to talking about terrorism and where the kids thought world events were going, and it suddenly occurred to me to ask those 18-year-olds, “What do you think about 9/11? How did it affect you?”

An awkward silence ensued. Finally one of them said, “Well, you know: I was eleven when it happened.” Some of the others strained to find a connection to the event, some remotely plausible way to say that Yes, it affected them. One girl said she knew someone who knew someone who had a relative in the twin towers, so yes, she allowed, in a way it affected her personally. “I thought about it, you know. All those people…” She shook her head and her voice trailed off. Clearly the connection she cited wasn’t really all that personal. The thoughts and feelings she reported didn’t sound very urgent.

I said, “Do you guys worry about terrorism? Is it on your mind at all?”

Another even more awkward silence, an embarrassed clearing of throats, a few hesitant, “Well, sort of” and “well, I guess maybes…”

But then the responses started coming, and it turned out that, no, these young folks didn’t really think about terrorism much. Terrorism was something that happened once, maybe it still happened in some places, and yes, they supposed it might possibly conceivably happen here where they were. Anything is possible. But I could tell that my question struck them as the fuddy duddy sort of thing an out-of-touch older person would say, someone who couldn’t move with the times, some who was still harping on the past. One of these kids finally broke through to saying, “What I worry about more, if you want to know, is global warming. You want to know what worries me? That’s what really worries me, what I care about? That’s it.”

It cast me back to the 1960s, when old people I knew droned on and on about the Communist menace, and how it had to be stopped because it was just like with Hitler, no one took him seriously at first either and look what happened. It all sounded just so world War II era to me, as a teenager. And World War II was some extremely bygone thing. It wasn’t till many years later, reading David Halberstam’s The Fifties that a thing I understood emotionally what I already knew intellectually of course, that in 1960, World War II was only 15 years in the past. People who had fought in that war and come home from horror at the age of 21 were then only 36. People who had been 40 when the big war ended, fully middle-aged mid-career, mom-and-pop type folks, were younger in 1960 than I am now. Of course their world was still framed by the concerns and ways of thinking that held true in World War II and just after. But to me, because World War II ended before I was born, when the old folks tried to frame a political discussion in World War II terms, they might as well have been talking about the Peloponnesian War.

What all this said to me that day in Arizona—and again when I heard about Obama winning the youth vote in Iowa (plus the fact that there even was a youth vote in Iowa)—was that the mainstream politicians of our times are already out of touch and don’t know it. Imagine how Rudolf Giuliani must sound to this layer of emerging 18 year olds: interrupting a speech to answer a cell phone call from his wife and explaining that ever since 9/11 he always answers calls from his wife. Understand that every year from now on there will be a new group of 18 years olds, emerging into political consciousness. If 9/11 is so Back-Then to the 18 year olds of today, think what it’s going to be each emerging plane of 18-year-olds in two years, three, four?