On Friday I gave my students the following writing assignment due today: "Since March 2003 more than twenty-eight hundred American men and women have died in Iraq while bringing democracy to that country. Explain to those dead Americans why you chose not to vote tomorrow."

Too harsh? Not harsh enough? So be it. I plead guilty to being disappointed by the paltry number of registered voters among my students, who are for the most part, suburban kids who live with their parents and work in full or part time jobs while attending school. They remind me of me when I was their age. That's why I was so surprised that so few cared enough to vote for the first time in their lives.

I was 20 years old when the 26th Amendment to the Constitution was ratified on July 1, 1971 giving the the right to vote to 18 year-olds. As far as amendments go, the 26th was a no brainer. It was ratified faster than any constitutional amendment in history, a mere 100 days after it was proposed on March 23, 1971. In that year, like this one, America was at war in a foreign land.

The average age of an American soldier in Vietnam was 19. The average age of the more than 58,000 Americans who were killed in Vietnam was 23. In 1971 the right of 18-year-olds to vote for or against the politicians who sent them off to war seemed not only overdue, but almost criminally so. Those of us of draft age were champing at the bit to cast our first ballots. For some reason I assumed kids would be the same today.

I don't want kids to be stupid about important stuff. And to me voting is important stuff. To me not registering to vote is seriously stupid, and these are not stupid kids. What they are, though, at 18 or 20, are kids. And kids need grown ups to guide them by word and by example. Sometimes I think that the restatement of a simple truth -- I don't know, God is love, that sort of thing -- sounds like nagging. But maybe kids need a little nagging. Maybe they need to hear over and over the universal verities -- voting is your duty as a citizen.

And if constitutional democracy is America's gift to the world, it is a gift flecked with the blood of those who died, who are dying today. It is a sin to squander a right that thousands have given their lives to preserve. We hold these truths to be so self evident that we never talk about them. Or we don't talk about them enough.

Last month 105 Americans died in Iraq, the third highest monthly total since the invasion. During the height of the Vietnam War in 1968-69 an average of 525 American soldiers were killed each month, and still that wasteful and unsuccessful conflict dragged on for another four years for American troops. If child is father to the man, then history is the mistakes of childhood revealed, while the glory of manhood is made manifest.

History teaches us, always, that we should have known better. The lesson of wars is that they are as avoidable as they seem to be inevitable. America has been at peace only a handful of years in my lifetime. And we as citizens rarely seem to have a say in when and where our country goes to war. Tomorrow's election is one of those rare opportunities when the entire nation can act as one in deciding hundreds of individual elected offices. Tomorrow's election is as local as across the street, even if that street is in Baghdad.