Election 2008: Choose or lose

By: Amy Saramago
Posted In: Opinion

Next year around this time you’ll be able to cast your vote for the next President of the United States. Are you ready? In the United States, 42,834,082 people fall between the ages of 18 to 30, only 27,913,813 of them are registered to vote. With these alarming statistics it has become obvious that many young adults are not politically active. In fact, in the 2004 election, only 42% of the youth in America actually voted, which was the election when George Bush became president for a second time. See: parents don’t always know best.

Although we young adults have the right to vote, we do not invoke it. Instead of caring about politics and our own future we are stuck in the mindset that it’s not our problem to deal with. We think, ‘let other people decide’. However, as we know, many of the issues for the presidency have dramatic effects on our age range. If a candidate who supports staying in Iraq is elected, our friends and families will continue to fight and risk death, or it might even evolve into a draft situation that our age group would get entangled into.

Other problems like health care, social security, and immigration are important issues in this election and we oblivious students feel that these topics aren’t vital to our everyday lives now so why should we care? But the truth is, we are going to be adults very soon, and the decisions and legislature made now will affect us personally and as a nation forever. When students get out of college we are no longer covered under our parents’ health care plans and will be having to buy our own or find jobs with health benefits. As we all know health care prices are soaring and most students won’t be able to afford health care. Therefore, we need to pay attention now to what candidates are proposing when it comes to health care problems. We need to look out for our future and our generation’s needs.

These issues, among many others, show why Salve, along with others in this generation, must be educated on the presidential election and be taught at a young age to vote (hopefully starting a trend in their life that they’ll continue). If our whole generation’s voice is silent, not only will we not like the outcome, but the leader of our nation will not realistically represent the needs and wants of its’ citizens. Therefore true democracy is not fully achieved.

Sadly, in 2004, more people in this age group voted for the winner of American Idol than they did the winner of the presidential election. Hopefully students not only here at Salve but everywhere will become more politically educated and change this pathetic statistic in the upcoming 2008 election. Although the election is a year away, people should start following the debates now and get to know the candidates (because one of them will be running the country soon), and make sure you are already registered to vote. If you haven’t registered yet, do so at www.rockthevote.com. There you can register for free and it only takes five minutes. Print it out and they’ll tell you the exact address to send it for your specific state. As the MTV voting campaign says: “If you don’t choose, you lose.”