I have never been interested in politics. Anytime someone would start talking about a presidential race or any political campaign, I would immediately stop listening and disregard anything they would say to me. It was not until high school when I had to take an American government class (which also counted towards my college credits) that I began to understand the basics of a political campaign and some of the issues surrounding our government today.

After that class, I still did not give politics much thought, and then, I turned 18. 18 means I have the right to vote and legally express who I believe is fit enough to run this country. To be honest, the thought of voting terrifies me. I literally just reached the age of a legal adult and I have absolutely no idea how my one vote is actually going to matter. There are over 300 million people in the United States of America, so why will my 1 vote matter?

This is not an uncommon thought process for young Americans. In the 2012 election, out of 235 million eligible voters in the United States only 129 million of those eligible people actually voted. That means that only 54% of eligible voters actually hit the polls in 2012. According to an online survey conducted by the Medill School of Journalism out of the 46% of eligible voters that did not cast their vote in 2012, most of nonvoters were young, uneducated, and poor.

This is where I almost want to freeze and ask for more information, but I am going to go out on a limb here and say that “young” does apply to new, 18 year-old voters like myself; or others that are commonly known as the millennial generation.

The upsetting part is that other statistics show that there were 64 million people of the millennial generation were eligible to vote and only 26% did according to the Center of Information and Research on Civic Learning Engagement. That means 76% of us did not vote! This is where I want to scream.

As a millennial, we are always getting bad rap for our laziness and self-centeredness, and I fight this reputation tooth and nail because I am not a lazy person who expects everything to be handed her. If I am going to accomplish something, it is going to be because I worked for it. But, this is where I almost want to give up and say, “Okay, you are right! We are lazy and we don’t care about our country’s future because we cannot even go out to the polls on election day!”

For those of you who are not grasping what I am trying to say here, let me break this down for you in a simpler way; we are the new generation who will be leading this country very soon. We will have to live with the consequences of the presidential election, so it matters who the next president is for us. It really truly matters.

At this point, you are probably wondering why I wrote this article. Well, I wrote it because we should not uphold the conventions the previous generation thinks of us. We, as millennials, need to take a stand and prove that we are not the entitled generation everyone perceives us as. The first step to breaking this stereotype is voting this election. This November is our chance to prove everyone that we are worth investing in and that we will have say in our future.