Today is Election Day in the United States and Nevada. My students are at home today and will not see this assignment. But the prompt is inspired by a comment from a student made during a previous voting season. The student, who liked being in my class, said something assuming that I hadn’t voted because voting was stupid, or something along those lines. This student worked hard at always appearing “cool,” so somewhere in his 8th grader existence he must have seen from other cool people that voting was for losers. I found this line of thinking interesting and kind of sad. I have voted in every election cycle going back to the first election I was old enough to vote in, almost 50-years ago, 1976. 

I completely understand how one can easily think that these things and issues are concerns for someone more qualified or more motivated or something. I mean, I already have a full-time job, I don’t need to be bothered every moment about decisions of state that are far above my pay-grade or any security clearance I don’t have. But going back to my first vote in 1976, I understood if I didn’t like something “the government” was doing, I had this one way to possibly influence said government, that was my vote.

I just don’t get the “don’t vote” way of dealing with how government (or the vote) doesn’t work. With the student who assumed I didn’t vote, I wonder if the adults in his life had experiences in another country or maybe they were dissuaded from voting here because their vote wasn’t welcomed. Either way, that makes me all the more motivated that my one possibly meaningless vote be counted. I am not that many generation away from a world where the vote of someone “unimportant,” someone not from the aristocracy would not be welcomed. At the same time, I’m not interested in regulating the day to day life of my fellow citizens. I just know that we can do better and problem isn’t “Washington” as much as maybe assuming that reasonable people in charge are going to do reasonable things. 

So, where are you in this, my vote doesn’t count/your vote shouldn’t count debate? All I know is that we can do better than this, but it is going to depend on us doing better and not waiting for someone to rescue us.