I have always been completely uninterested in voting.
All through my public education, the students were given the ultimate experience: the opportunity to vote for the student council, their voice to the school about what students want.
(Some readers may draw from the following paragraphs certain parallels between the student council elections and presidential elections: this is intentional.)
When you are seven, two or three kids stand up and convince the class that they're going to fight for more snow days and cancel homework. You vote for whichever kid said they wouldn't be your best friend unless you voted for them.
When you are twelve, there is an assortment of kids who put out their campaign in the hallways. Some of them are still on the homework cancellation kick, others are committed to solving the interest conflicts regarding the use of the school's budget and the nutritional content of school lunches. If you're a popular kid, you vote for the popular kid on the ballot; if you're not popular, you're either bullied into voting for the popular kid, or you vote for the nerd with the knowledge that you're going to lose anyway.
By the time you reach the age of sixteen, you have come to learn that really the student council is nothing more than a puppet government. They don't have any more power than deciding the theme of the next school dance, but for some reason, the administration loves to point out that every single student complaint has come about due to a decision made by the student council. In the end, you don't give a damn who you vote for, but there's a lot of talk about it. In the end, the popular kids all vote for their friends and the rest of us have write-in candidates including Cher and Kermit The Frog.
Now, based upon these early experiences to the voting process, add this one to the list. I was too young to vote in the last presidential election, and had I been able to, I have no doubt I would have come out of that experience feeling, well, cheated is a good word.
As it stands, the experiences of my formative years, plus the memory of that political farce that was the 2000 vote, as well as the knowledge of the workings of the electoral process, I don't really have what might be called any faith in the difference of a single vote.
However, today I received an e-mail from one of my professors about 33 women who were arrested in 1917 for picketing the White House about the right to vote. This is referred to now as the "Night of Terror". Here is the original website from which the e-mail came.
There are times that I have wondered what the sufferagettes who fought for my right to vote would think of my decision not to vote. This is another one of those times. They had to put up with a lot of shit and by the time the ammendmant was passed in 1920, many of the original fighters were no longer alive to vote. Who am I to throw their work back in their faces and flatly deny my own rights?
On the flip side, though, what are we actually getting? We're getting a right that doesn't seem to make all that much difference if the vote actually depends on a small handful of people who can do whatever they want irregardless of the popular vote. This is all because the founding fathers of this country decided that the average person was too stupid to vote.
Well, I guess George Bushes Jr. and Sr. are proof enough of that, but they actually got to be president, so obviously something about the whole process is not working somewhere.
Unfortunately, as soon as Americans are given the right to something, they also posses the right not to exert their right. We've been allowed to become lazy and safe, and choose not to exercise our right, especially my generation. The statistics suggest that something like 30% of college age registered voters actually vote. Every where I go, someone is asking me if I am registered to vote, I am. Are they asking me if I have an absentee ballot? No. I have the request form in my room. Do I want to send away for it? I don't know.
But now I'm thinking a little harder.