During my second semester of my senior year, I took a required course called United States Government. With the timing of the course and the hype surrounding the 2016 Presidential Election, most of those class periods were spent discussing each candidate, the issues presented by the candidates, and the voting process.
My Government teacher was a man named Mr. Skaggs who I had never had before in high school. While he tried to not impose his views on us, he stated that in this election (which at this point had almost certainly come down to Donald Trump as the Republican Party candidate and Hillary Clinton as the Democratic Party candidate) choosing a candidate to vote for would come down to picking the “lesser of two evils.” That statement really stuck with me as I realized my favored presidential candidate, who had not yet dropped out of the race, had no real chance of winning the election.
During the 2008 Presidential Election, I was in the fifth grade at Maize Central Elementary School. My parents constantly talked about the election. During Barack Obama’s first term as President of the United States, my Republican father remarked how he was glad he could complain about what Obama was doing as President. I said that anyone could complain about things they didn’t like Obama doing, but my dad simply replied with, “I voted in the election. If you don’t vote in the election because you don’t care enough to voice your opinion, you really have no room to complain about the President you didn’t want in the office later on.”
Through my years in high school, I encountered many teenagers who didn’t care for politics. I myself was not heavily involved with them, but I did pay attention, as I wanted to inform myself for the upcoming day of my first presidential election as a legal adult on Tuesday, November 8th, 2016. My peers remarked about how much they really didn’t care about voting and I can only imagine what half of their reactions will be after the results of the election later this year.
I am writing this article to persuade you to register to vote. I don’t care who you vote for and I will not tell you who to vote for either. Vote for the people who can’t, only legal citizens of the United States that are eighteen or older are legally allowed to vote. Vote for someone because their political platforms mean to something to you. There are multiple important issues addressed by the presidential candidates, but it’s up to you to determine which ones are most important to you.
I won’t impose my political beliefs on you. If you really want to know who I may be voting for in this election or what I believe, feel free to do some digging on my social media or throughout my other articles. The only thing I want you as a reader to take away from this article is the statement that if you are of legal age, do your civic duty and vote come election day this November. You’ll thank yourself in the long run for actively participating in trying to make this country a better place for your family, friends, and yourself.
