Our Votes Count
Avoid Black-And-White Thinking, Make Our Voices Heard And Our Opinions Matter
A West Hartford resident says millennials, who too often don’t vote, need to make their opinions and voices heard.
If a guy treated you like this, you’d tell him to get lost. If it was your boss, you’d look for a new job. Given how America has treated young adults, it’s not surprising we don’t show up to the polls.
A boyfriend would ask forgiveness, but not America. This country won’t try to win you back or tell you things will change. Things will change — and they’ll change without you.
I’m talking to you, young Americans ages 18 to 29 — dare I call us “millennials” and lose half of any possible readership — but this is not another opinion piece about why we suck. I’m not about to bring my generation down with some avocado-toast insult or lament our generation’s role in the death of mayonnaise (honestly, thank God). I don’t need to use anything that petty because I’ve got a frightening fact. Forty percent of respondents to an Institute of Politics poll, ages 18 to 29, said they are likely to cast a ballot in the midterm elections. Forty percent.
That means 60 percent of people from 18 to 29 aren’t likely to vote. That’s over half and it’s not even counting the people who forget or get stuck with a 10-hour shift on Nov. 6. (That’s Election Day, by the way.) Fewer than 40 percent of Americans in this age bracket will use their vote.
Apparently, this is a statistic to celebrate. If the data is correct, the 2018 midterm elections will be the third time since 1986 that turnout among young Americans will surpass 20 percent. We’re double our normal attendance rate and we still earn a failing grade. This is not OK.
I don’t care how you vote, which I consider rare in a year when every push for votes has strings attached. The social media blitzes encouraging you to vote all seem to come with a footnote: Vote! (*Democrat) Vote! (*Republican).
I don’t disagree with their message — everyone who can should vote — but please, at least pretend to respect my intelligence when you target me with Instagram ads. I prefer not to imagine a room full of campaign experts minimizing me and my social group into a voting bloc, but they already have. Some are betting we won’t show; they’ve got statistics on their side, they already know that our apathy is as guaranteed as the next episode of “The Good Place” will play in 6 … 5 … 4. Couldn’t even wait until 3.
All that? It’s not a good feeling. But it fits in strategically with the landscape of 2018: You’re exhausted by the news, the economy is great but that’s not exactly showing up in your paycheck, and let’s throw student loans in there because I’ll bet my interest you have them. From here, it’s a depressed hop, an unfeeling skip and a what-we’d-be-generous-to-call leap to, “Why bother? My vote won’t matter anyway.”
Let’s depart politics for a moment and stroll on over to psychology. Black-and-white thinking is a habit where a person cannot connect the good and the bad qualities in one thing, person or situation to view it realistically. At worst, this is the symptom of personality disorder; at best, it’s the most human reaction we can have. It stems from fight or flight, the brain function that makes quick decisions simple for us: There is a woolly mammoth over there, that’s bad. There is no woolly mammoth over here, that’s good.
The American political landscape looks a lot like black-and-white thinking these days. The injection of cortisol from push alerts, ticker tape
“Our nation never claimed to be perfect, but to work toward more perfect. The least we can do is find one small reason to believe our vote is getting it closer to perfect.”
Ali Oshinskie
and senatorial sound bites sends us into fight or flight. Certain beliefs, like those on abortion and gun rights, mean exclusion from one or other of the major parties.
It might be consoling to think of the other party as bad and yours as good. But that cannot be true. Nothing can be all good or all bad. It’s not wishful thinking to hope for the best in humans, it’s realistic: Democrats do good things and so do Republicans. It’s not convenient or cozy to think someone politically opposed to you rescued a pit bull or had to quit a job to care for an elderly mother. But it’s mentally healthy to consider the reality that both donkeys and elephants have feelings.
That’s a big ask, so let me make a slightly smaller one. If we can’t keep our politics immune to it, let’s try not subject our voting system to black-and-white thinking. The Founding Fathers, the Abolitionists, the feminists, the civil rights activists deserve better than all or nothing. Our nation never claimed to be perfect, but to work toward more perfect. The least we can do is find one small reason to believe our vote is getting it closer to perfect.
In any event, it’s not true that your voice doesn’t matter when you vote. It only matters if you vote. And if you don’t vote, you are telling yourself that your voice shouldn’t and won’t be heard.