I don’t know about you, but this has been a pretty emotional week for me. Maybe it’s the typical stress of midterm season creeping up, maybe it’s the toll recent incidents of hate speech and intolerance on our campus have taken or maybe it’s something deeper. But as I watched the second presidential debate last Sunday night, I felt a gaping pit open in the middle of my stomach. As each minute passed, each punch was thrown and each opportunity for remorse and accountability was deflected, I succumbed to defeat. The America I was raised to believe in — the tolerant, hopeful, opportunity-ridden America they teach us about as kids — was dead. I went to bed that night terrified of a new era emerging in this country where hate and division reign supreme.
But this isn’t true. Rather, this doesn’t have to be true. Right here and now, we have an opportunity to alter the course of history. We have a chance to denounce the negativity that has swept across our country and replace it with a positive vision for our future. And the simplest and most fundamental way to combat this negativity is through our votes.
On Monday night, I covered an event at Eastern Michigan University where Sen. Cory Booker (D–N.J.) campaigned for Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, along with Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D–Mich.), Sen. Gary Peters (D–Mich.) and Rep. Debbie Dingell (D–Ann Arbor). The event truly could not have come at a more perfect time. I left feeling inspired, invigorated and hopeful that we can break this cycle of cynicism. We can be angry at all of the recent events, but as Sen. Booker said, we must decide that “we are not going to allow … our inability to do everything to undermine our determination to do something.” We cannot let ourselves fall into what Booker calls a “state of sedentary agitation.” It is one thing to discuss our anger at the negativity invading our country, but we need to channel that anger into action. If we wish to erase the negative, we must register, we must vote and we must encourage others to do the same.
College students are in a unique position to make an incredible impact on this election. For many of us, this is the first presidential election in which we are eligible to vote. For the first time, we do not have to defer to our parents’ or our grandparents’ generations to determine the path our futures will take. Yet, college students in the past few presidential elections have voted at rates of about 40 percent. In fact, young adults ages 18 to 24 constitute the group with the lowest voter turnout of any age group in this country. At the same time, people 65 and over vote at rates of nearly 70 percent. If we do not show up to the polls, we cannot complain about policies that have an adverse impact on our lives. If we do not vote, older generations will continue to drive us down the negative path we already see on the horizon.
As President Obama remarked in his commencement address at Howard University in May, “When we don’t vote, we give away our power, disenfranchise ourselves — right when we need to use the power that we have; right when we need your power to stop others from taking away the vote and rights of those more vulnerable than you.” We cannot do everything, but voting is one small action we can take that will have huge implications for our futures.
I’ve heard many people recently saying that instead of choosing the “lesser of two evils,” they are simply not going to vote. These people claim they can sacrifice the next four years of their lives and reset at the next election when the parties put up more worthy candidates. Here’s the reality: Millions of people in this country cannot afford to sacrifice these next four years. For many, this election is the difference between poverty and prosperity, employment and unemployment, equality and inequality — even life and death. This election will determine whether people who have lived in the United States their entire lives will be deported. This election will determine whether women will still have control over their own health. This election will determine how we see race, gender, sexuality and diversity in our country: with tolerance or with division. Those of us who have the “luxury” not to vote have an obligation to vote. As Sen. Booker asserted, “The most perverse type of privilege, the most dangerous type of privilege, is that there’s a serious problem out there, but because it doesn’t affect you personally, it’s not your problem.”
If we love our country and still see the light amid so much darkness, then we must vote.
Sen. Booker ended his speech with an excerpt from the poem Let America Be America Again by Langston Hughes:
O, let America be America again —
The land that never has been yet —
And yet must be — the land where every man is free.
The land that’s mine — the poor man’s, Indian’s, Negro’s, ME —
Who made America,
Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain,
Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain,
Must bring back our mighty dream again …
O, yes, I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath —
America will be!
Melissa Strauss can be reached at melstrau@umich.edu.