Like many other young adults in the United States right now, I’ve recently turned eighteen. In the United States, eighteen is the gateway to adulthood. Not all the privileges afforded to older adults exist for you yet, but plenty of doors are opened for you, including going to clubs, buying cough syrup without a parent, and renting a hotel room. The biggest and probably most looked forward to however, is voting. Eighteen year olds all over the country are about to vote for the first time in probably one of the worst elections in American history, emphasis on the “one of” because let’s face it– no election has been a good election. Presidential candidates are never perfect, but the goal is to get as close to that as possible. As President of the United States your duty isn’t to yourself but to the whole country, including minorities. This year’s election shows no sign of true public service being the primary goal of either candidate.
As far as self-service goes, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are two of the biggest examples of the ‘Me First’ ideology. This train of thought guarantees that a person will put their own personal wants and needs before the good of the country. Why would anyone want to vote for candidates like this, especially if its your first time voting? I’ve always been a conspiracy theorist myself so before I even reached eighteen, I had my doubts about the electoral process. It was hard to imagine that the vote of one eighteen year old could compare against the votes of the 218,959,000 people who were also eligible to vote. It’s hard to imagine because it’s nearly impossible for my vote to hold its own against so many others. Voting doesn’t depend on singular people with their own ideas going to vote, it depends on groups of people with a similar grasp on how they think the country should be run going to vote. To be fair however, that’s why our nominees are who they are.
For some people it was surprising, shocking even that Donald Trump would actually stand a chance at becoming the Republican nominee, yet here we are. For others, they never thought Hillary would be able to step foot in the White House if it wasn’t to support a male President, and now she’s the Democratic nominee. I’m not shocked by either of those truths, and I think many other first time voters aren’t either. Hillary’s and Trump’s politics represent the political stance of the majority of America, despite how dirty and reprehensible the rest of us might find them. Trump is racist, homophobic, transphobic, and xenophobic– just to name a few of his negative qualities. He’s the epitome of white male privilege masquerading as if he is actually qualified to run a country. Hillary’s politics and actions already show what kind of leader she will be, the kind that lies and then covers her tracks or the kind that’s okay with the blood of thousands of people being on her hands. How are we supposed to choose between the two?
We might be young but millennials have been known to have their heads and hearts in the right place for the most part. We want a candidate that is truly here to serve all of the people, not just a select few. To older generations we are selfish and irrational but we know better. Bernie Sanders was the choice candidate for many because he stood for what we believed in; he wanted equal pay for men and women, a better regulated police force, cheaper college tuition, the breaking up of big banks, and affordable healthcare for minorities and lower income families. Bernie mirrored what millennials wanted in a future that was meant for them. He was older by several decades but he understood what being the President of the United States entailed– you put the good of the country first and your own personal gain last. With Bernie it was a possibility that we wouldn’t have to choose between two evils, he was our hope. Though millennials do provide good talk, the majority of us aren’t able to actually go out and vote. The few who were able to go, didn’t. We lost our candidate because the United States was not ready for him but neither were we.
Now, as November is just around the corner, waiting to rear its ugly head, first-time voters have another choice to make; do we vote for the lesser of two evils or do we sit this one out? If you’re no longer a doubter like I was and you believe in the power of voting, then you know what you’ve got to do. If you’re choosing to stand by and watch this all go up in flames, you’d better take stock of what that means, which liberties you’re deciding you’re willing to give up. America might be the farthest thing from perfect, but that doesn’t mean that you get to be okay with watching the country enter something it may not be able to come back from. This election doesn’t just hurt individual people, it hurts everyone as a whole and each of us has the ability to make a difference with our vote. Individually our votes are next to insignificant, but together, they can do a whole lot of good.
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