You have a voice, it’s called voting!

 Mark Braboy
Associate Editor

Young people are powerful. We are powerful and influential in ways that we cannot begin to imagine, especially when it comes to elections.

It is a known fact that our voting power in this country truly makes a significant difference. Our participation in the 2008 and 2012 presidential elections shows this. However, the overall attitude of a lot of young people in my generation is that they just do not care to participate in political elections.

Growing up, I always looked at voting as an important, but cool thing to do. Voting was the thing to do in me and my sister’s eyes. Heck, we watched President George W. Bush and his administration practically tear down the country for eight long years, only to vote the first African-American president into office. It was exciting to finally have a political say so for the first time.

So when I began to hear people talk about not participating in elections it was unfathomable to me. As time went on however, and while I still strongly disagree with it, I understand why a lot of poor and disenfranchised people do not vote.

While a lot of us do not actually vote, we are the most politically aware and engaged out of every generation and have an insane degree of exposure to all kinds of information.

A lot of people my age just simply do not know how the political machine works. All across social media, you can see all kinds of propaganda that prey on frustrated young.

The other reason, and perhaps the biggest, is because a lot of people are simply not satisfied with the system and feel voiceless.

When we look at a lot of elections, all we see are a bunch of socially detached men and women who only show up in the community when they are looking for a job with a lot of perks.

Many of these politicians do not really care to take the issues of young people, ages 18-35, seriously enough and we see through that.

In our minds, we are thinking “I spent my time trying to vote for this person and they didn’t do anything for me! Why should I keep voting for people who just give lip service?”

Today, it’s more evident to us that the system is broken.  Voting in 2015 feels more like picking the lesser of two evils more than picking the best candidate that will address the issues that matter to us.

Even student government elections suffer low turnouts. A lot of people do not participate in voting because they feel that the people who are elected do not have the best interests of the student body at heart, but only want power, privilege, and favor for themselves.

Overall, it is not that we do not care about the issues we face, it is just that we do not care for the people who claim that they represent the people, because we know it’s a lie. The problem is that whenever we choose not to vote, the people who we do not want in power end up becoming elected.

I believe that if more of us voted against the people that we do not want in power, it can help. It is not an end all, be all solution, but it can prevent worst case scenarios from happening. It is better for us to participate rather than to just to sit back and let the world crumble.