Yesterday, again I walked the neighborhood in my precinct, urging a vote for Barack Obama by every person I saw. And I found something very discouraging. A young man in his early 20s was busy washing his car and said he couldn't stop to talk, "I don't have time." Another young man in his late 20s answered the door, "I still haven't decided and probably won't until election day." Another came to the door after his mother got him off the sofa where he was watching a football game, "I think I'm going to be out of town on election day." When I told him he could vote absentee, he said, "OK, we'll see."
Here's the sad truth: the odds are great that none of these young voters will vote on November 4.Some young people will tell you they don’t vote because they believe their vote isn’t going to make a difference. Of course, it does. Of the 110 million votes cast in the 2000 presidential race, just 537 votes in Florida made the difference in the outcome. That’s 537 powerful citizens!
Maybe our youth don’t vote because they spend too much time listening to the idle barber shop conversation of their elders. On any given Saturday morning, you’ll hear someone getting a clip explain away his lack of personal involvement with “It doesn’t matter who gets elected; special interests control government anyway.”
But it does matter. It matters very much.
In the introduction to her recent book,
Be the Change, Michelle Nunn wrote
“We stand at a time of enormous potential but also of danger – environmental hazards, nuclear proliferation, global poverty, and terrorism are all very real threats to our world and the promise of progress. But perhaps the biggest obstacle of all is apathy.”If our youth don't bother to vote, we have bigger problems than determining just who will sit in the Oval Office. We have our future at risk. Please urge every young person you know between the ages of 18 and 34 to "bother" to vote.
