Millennials: vote for your future

Iremember my mother reading Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have A Dream” speech to me at bath time before I ever heard about Cinderella or Snow White. I remember playing hooky from my thirdgrade homeroom to shadow her AP Government class at Loch Raven High School — a sea of high school sophomores in low-rise jeans, held captive by her passionate calls to action, to engage in the democratic process that so many died for their right to participate in.

I don’t think she was ever prouder of me than when I joined my school’s Model Congress team, an organization she had been active in at her school for years. I still keep the gavel she won for “Best Advisor” on my desk, where I now pull all-nighters for my graduate course work — where I study, among other things, the role of marginalized people in that same democratic system she loved so much, which frankly, has not always held up its end of the bargain on our behalf.

She died on April 22, 2016, before President Donald Trump was much more than a punchline in the Republican primary race.

We are the generation of Black Lives Matter and the Women’s March and #MeToo and the March for Our Lives. We know our voices have power in the media sphere — so let’s make them heard with our ballots, too, because believe it or not, we can change the system by engaging with the system.