Could you imagine how powerful our generation would be if we put down the iPhones to get up and vote for our future president? Only 45% of people aged 18-29 voted in the last presidential election. It’s our future and the mess that is left behind by the older generations will be ours to clean up, but only half of our generation cares enough to take the time to vote. The candidates know that so they’ve wisely chosen to focus on the older generations who all seem to care enough about their (shorter) futures to vote. This is impacting us the most, this will effect our futures and our children’s futures if we don’t take a stand now. We can overpower the older generations if we simply care enough to.

Just to give a few small statistics about the current status of our country: we, as a generation, will experience more student debt, poverty, and unemployment than the two generations preceding us. We will experience more diminished wealth and income than our parents and our grandparents’ generations. This should scare you. This means that our generation will be the first generation in hundreds of years to be less well-off than our parents.

18-29 year olds make up 21% of the eligible voting population in the United States. That is almost one fourth of the entire eligible voting population and it’s consists solely of millennials. To translate that into raw numbers, it’s 46 million voters. 46 million people in our generation are eligible to vote, but less than half of them do. There are 39 million eligible senior citizen voters in our country. Want to make a guess what percentage of them vote in every election? Bet you don’t. (72%)

News articles all over the country are expressing how influential our generation could be in this upcoming election. There are stories, statistics, and polls about the ways in which to encourage Millennials to vote for your party. These candidates realize our potential to change the course of the president, but do you?

I hope so because it’s not just your future anymore. It’s ours. Year after year we are being handed bigger and bigger messes to clean up. If we don’t start taking a stand and making a difference, will we ever? Will this generation ever care enough about the world around them and the crumbling government to actually garner the motivation to change something?

Start questioning the politics and start asking the hard questions. Your voice needs to be heard. Our voices need to be heard. We are the future. We are the ones who matter. We are the generation with the potential to change the world, but not the motivation. Let’s change that destiny. Stop sitting back and letting the older generations destroy our future.

I don’t care who you vote for, I honestly don’t. I just care that you place an educated vote in that ballot box. Show these candidates and the future ones that we are stepping up to the plate and they need to get ready. Show them that we finally care enough about our futures to make a change, so that the next time these campaigns come around, they’ll be focusing on our future.

Generation Y, let’s go change the world!

All statistics were found on these websites:

http://www.civicyouth.org/quick-facts/youth-voting/

https://www.census.gov/prod/2014pubs/p20-573.pdf

http://www.cnn.com/2015/02/23/opinion/zelizer-millennials-politics/