Voting
I should have written an entry like this a week ago. But after reading a friend's post about not voting in the election and some of the responses to that post, I decided to post something that everyone can see.
No, you shouldn't randomly pick someone to vote for without knowing the issues. Instead, you should learn about the issues! How hard is it to read some news articles in a newspaper or online, or watch the debates or watch CNN? With the way the newsmedia is these days, it's hard to have an excuse to be uninformed.
And if you don't want to vote, that's fine. But if you don't exercise your right to vote, then you lose your right to complain about the system because when you had a chance to change the system, you ignored that chance. You can't complain about taxes and about how social security takes a huge part of your pay check. You can't complain about paying a lot of money to see a doctor for anything because you don't have health care. You can't complain about the government not doing enough to cure cancer when they could do so within ten years if they put more funding into stem cell research. You can't complain about how easy it is for a criminal to buy a gun (or even an assault rifle). Until you educate yourself on these issues and vote for a candidate that feels the same way you do about them, you really can't complain about anything government-related.
And now the next argument about voting is that your vote doesn't count and/or matter. In the grand scheme of things that might be true because no election has ever been decided by a single vote. But young people voting shows that young people care about their country is being run, and it shows that politicians need to start listening to the issues that affect us. All the pundits on tv were talking before the election about how "the youth turnout" could change the results, but that didn't happen, because not enough young people voted.
I think most people can probably tell from that middle paragraph that I supported Kerry. But at the same time, I have a lot of respect for Bush. My hope is that Bush and Congress will see what happened in this election and realize how incredibly divided our country is now. The country is split pretty much 50/50 on what candidate is best, if we should be in Iraq, and so many other social issues. Politicians need to realize that in such a divided time, it's not good to play partisan politics because nothing will get accomplished. Instead, Congress needs to work at issues that everyone feels a certain way about, and find compromises on issues that the parties are split on.
No, you shouldn't randomly pick someone to vote for without knowing the issues. Instead, you should learn about the issues! How hard is it to read some news articles in a newspaper or online, or watch the debates or watch CNN? With the way the newsmedia is these days, it's hard to have an excuse to be uninformed.
And if you don't want to vote, that's fine. But if you don't exercise your right to vote, then you lose your right to complain about the system because when you had a chance to change the system, you ignored that chance. You can't complain about taxes and about how social security takes a huge part of your pay check. You can't complain about paying a lot of money to see a doctor for anything because you don't have health care. You can't complain about the government not doing enough to cure cancer when they could do so within ten years if they put more funding into stem cell research. You can't complain about how easy it is for a criminal to buy a gun (or even an assault rifle). Until you educate yourself on these issues and vote for a candidate that feels the same way you do about them, you really can't complain about anything government-related.
And now the next argument about voting is that your vote doesn't count and/or matter. In the grand scheme of things that might be true because no election has ever been decided by a single vote. But young people voting shows that young people care about their country is being run, and it shows that politicians need to start listening to the issues that affect us. All the pundits on tv were talking before the election about how "the youth turnout" could change the results, but that didn't happen, because not enough young people voted.
I think most people can probably tell from that middle paragraph that I supported Kerry. But at the same time, I have a lot of respect for Bush. My hope is that Bush and Congress will see what happened in this election and realize how incredibly divided our country is now. The country is split pretty much 50/50 on what candidate is best, if we should be in Iraq, and so many other social issues. Politicians need to realize that in such a divided time, it's not good to play partisan politics because nothing will get accomplished. Instead, Congress needs to work at issues that everyone feels a certain way about, and find compromises on issues that the parties are split on.