Man! I was so buzzed!" "I got it on with him/her." "I got a ticket - cops suck!" All are typical comments one finds on blog sites and Facebook pages of young people according to recent news stories.
Most of us still remember being a teenager. Not only were we omniscient, but we also knew how to solve all the world's problems. We rarely paid attention to current events and voted for a person because 'we liked their personality'. We were also immortal, hormone driven, and firmly believed few authority figures had a clue what "real life" was like. Few of us believed there really was "life after high school," and if you tried to tell one of us that one day Congress or some other employer might review what we write, particularly on our blogsites, Facebook pages or on Twitter, we would have simply laughed because that was "never going to happen." Sound familiar? If so, its just a reminder that "they" were right. Our kids really have become us.
According to the media pundits, blogs and Facebook are a place young people express themselves free of authoritative limits and criticism. Things are different "now," they tell their "rents." Of course it really isn't, with one major exception. Today, anything put on-line may show up in the future and cast us in a most dreadful way in front of some Congressional committee or other potential employer. Unfortunately, there is no statue of limitations on what we wrote as teenagers. Perhaps there should be.
Watching a confirmation hearing not long ago I wondered, "How long it will be before a nominee's 'background check' includes going back and reviewing the on-line comments a nominee made as a teenager on their Facebook pages and Twitter accounts?"
Will critics roast you for a "youthful on-line indiscretion" made as a teenager? Employers do it now, without question background checks by the government will include it soon too, if they are not already doing it already. Remember it was only a couple of months ago the Department of Homeland Security and the National Security Agency revealed they are 'looking for potential threats' on Facebook and Twitter.
Imagine being nominated for the Supreme Court, FBI, CIA or even landing a sought after job interview in industry and had penned on an Internet web page 20+ years earlier, that you got drunk, used pot, or that you shoplifted but didn't get caught while you were in junior high or high school. You may have done it, or just said you did to try to be 'kewl', but that won't matter much once it gets discovered in your confirmation hearing or job interview. The media and of course all the "saints" in Congress, will be on you like flies on rotten garbage. You can claim you "didn't inhale" all you want, but if you wrote that you did at the time on Facebook or in that Twitter post you are like to be headed for a "Borking."
That time is no longer "just around the corner," it's now. I guess it comes down to this. If you have such a 'youthful indiscretion' reported somewhere in the annals of the Internet, forget getting through a scrub by all the hypocrites in Congress.
Run for President instead. It doesn't seem to matter what you did before anyhow to the voter who votes for the most likeable, not the most qualified. As we have seen in the last couple of administrations, the President always gets the last laugh on the electorate anyhow.
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