**Disclaimer: I have not seen the data that Vi Hart references. This article is meant to go over part of Vi Hart’s video and its contents.**
Vi Hart is a longtime YouTuber. Her videos usually center around math concepts and math history and consist of her doodling in a notebook while she does a voiceover about the video’s topic. She is a graduate of Stony Brook University and has co-authored several papers on computational geometry.
On November 23, Vi Hart uploaded a video in the aftermath of the 2016 U.S. election and offered her analysis of the results. She proposed that the big divide in the U.S. is not between parties or culture, but age. After looking at various post election polls, she noticed a trend where older citizens (45 and up) tended to vote for Trump and younger citizens, particularly 18 to 25, tended to vote for Hillary.
With that in mind, Vi Hart looked at the factors that shape the opinions of the two age groups. The average age in rural areas is increasing as more young people are moving to cities. Churches are a bigger part of the culture and community in rural areas and sometimes provide the support that the government offices in cities would have provided. Rural areas don’t always have easy access to resources such as universities and courts in comparison to cities. Baby boomers are worried about their retirements, healthcare, and losing their jobs because of industry changes that they can’t control. In short, the system is failing them.
Millennials are scared for their futures just as much as baby boomers are, but millennials have different fears. We don’t expect job security: we expect to have multiple jobs, possibly in different industries. Age is correlated with racial diversity and the younger generation is more diverse than the previous generation. We grew up with environmental concerns waved in our faces, whereas baby boomers did not. Millennials do not expect to have the world that their parents had, but do expect to inherit a world with many problems that they did not ask for. But perhaps the greatest difference is that older voters are more likely to, well, vote. This was a good election to appeal to older voters. It was unfortunate that appealing to older voters, this year, meant playing into their fears.
Vi Hart’s main goal for this video was to help heal this divide. The way to bridge the gap between the generations is by not dismissing each other. As she put it, “This is a gap you bridge by being kind to each other. By asking older America not reject America’s youth, and younger America to respect our history and our elders and make sure they are not forgotten in a world of new technology.” The older generation cares for the country’s future as does the younger generation. If we stop ignoring each other, we could find a direction for America that we can agree on.
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