On my desk lies a stack of paper with many different items, ranging from old bus tickets to a syllabus for every class, from notebook papers to, yes, even the occasional issue of The Poly. However, there is one thing that stands out from the rest because of its extreme importance. While its front is decoratively branded with an artistic rendering of the words “Official Voting Mail,” not much else about it is striking. But that one word, voting, and what it enables me to be, a voter, is striking.
My absentee ballot for the great State of New Hampshire arrived just before Columbus Day. I have not yet made up my mind about which of the candidates I’m going to choose, but I have it nonetheless. This is a far cry from my voter position as early as mid-summer. At that point, I thought that I had made up my mind. Being of legal age to vote, I maintained my high school pessimism and subscribed to the opinion that, because I did not believe in either candidate for president, I could simply refuse to vote.
Hold on here, refuse to vote? Just how un-American a thing would that be? To put it best, I use the words of a close friend of mine who has been vigorously campaigning for a McCain presidency: “Sean, remember, as American citizens, we can exercise our right not to vote just as much as we can exercise our right to vote.” Now, I can’t be sure whether or not he meant that with sincerity, or if he said it just because he thought I was in the bag for Obama, but I thought his words added to what justifications I had already formed to exercise “voter abstinence,” as Stephen Colbert would call it.
It didn’t take me long to realize how wrong I had been to come to such a conclusion so early. Someone had changed my mind about it, and why my opinion on the nature of our nation’s government mattered—my mother. As a green-card holding legal resident of the U.S., she pays taxes, works for the Head Start preschool program, and enjoys many of the freedoms that citizens are allowed to vote in regard to. Originally wanting to pass my vote to her and allow her to choose for me, I realized that I could not sacrifice my own opinion, that I had to get off my lazy butt and do the research needed to come to a conclusion of my own. Only then would I earn my citizenship; I certainly hope the rest of my generation has had a chance to think and come to this conclusion.
