What's Not To Fear

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My Life

Growing up black in America automatically means you are forced to grow up with a double consciousness. Are you African? Are you from America? Are you both? What does that mean? There are many different answers and responses depending on who you ask. If you ask me, the answers would be as follows: Yes and proud of it, yeah, by a technicality, duh, and unfortunately, it means a whole lot of shitty things. 

To be African American means for the past four hundred years, your life has been a political spectacle from enslavement, to jim crow, to segregation, to police brutality. The lives and history of my people have been on ballots since America has been a democracy. I feel it is in my very nature to speak out against injustice. To do my civic duty to vote and concern myself with the politics of my country. Someone years ago did this so I could have the freedoms I do today. This, to me, is the reason I take politics so seriously, and everyone else should as well. It's about time we all got political. It is about time we vote.

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The Problem

The election of Trump vs. Biden was monumental in the fact that voter turnout had reached what it had not reached in decades, with a voter turnout of 158.4 million, which is pretty good. Yet we still sore behind thirty other democracies. That number is only a voter rate turnout of 62.8%. So why are people not voting? Even the U.K. ranked below America. Why are the A-1 democracies doing so poorly in voter turnout? Why are we, as a nation trailing behind Uruguay? Let's look at a social reason and 

What The Kids Are Saying

Nowadays, people are scared to talk about politics in public for fear that it will lead to an argument or that someone will be uncomfortable. I say to heck with that. I was raised in a household where politics and talking over dinner were one and the same. Any important news of the day was discussed among everyone as bread was broken, and green beans were passed. That is how it should be. It is the duty of your parents to introduce you to such topics so you can go out into the world. Instead, you have parents alike telling young adults that they know nothing. So then they believe they really don't know anything. 

But politics is not just about knowing things. It is about standing up and doing what your ancestors would have wanted from you. If you are in America, it means someone hundreds of years ago hated your ancestors enough to commit genocide against them or some severe form of oppression. So your ancestors most likely fled in hopes of a better life. While some of us got there sooner than others, and we are still fighting in parts, we are a country where everyone is "equal" (eh). At Least we can all vote, and that is what I am getting at. Someone in this country years ago made a stand and risked their life so you could have the right to vote. So go out and vote. Use that power. 

What Studies Say

Most researchers say the reason voter turnout for the 2020 election was so high was due to the method of voting. Due to the pandemic, people were able to vote in untraditional ways that we were not used to. Some states had "rolled back early voting, absentee or mail-in voting, and other rule changes that made voting easier in 2020". Well, getting a good grasp of voter turnout is tricky. These extra pushes should have led to a bigger turnout for the country that is literally the face of democracy. And after the pandemic, a lot of Americans felt like they had to vote. Many people were now seeing their lives directly affected by policies and wanted to see some change. 

Other countries with good turnouts have laws that make voting compulsory. If you have that in a free democracy, then are you really a free democracy? Is there an extent or limit? We, as Americans, genuinely love our freedom, but when is enough enough? When is it acceptable to start to direct our people to make this a better country? I am not saying we send people to jail, but we could do phone calls or home visits. After multiple offenses, we could start to fine people. There is no good excuse to not participate in the democracy of your country. Four out of the five countries with the highest voter turnout implement this. Researchers see this as a great idea. We are out of options, and the American people have no serious reason as to why they do not vote except for the fact they are American and lazy. We have choices in this country. You need to pay more attention. 

Works cited

DeSilver, Drew. “Turnout in U.S. Has Soared in Recent Elections but by Some Measures Still Trails That of Many Other Countries.” Pew Research Center, Pew Research Center, 15 Dec. 2022, https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2022/11/01/turnout-in-u-s-has-soared-in-recent-elections-but-by-some-measures-still-trails-that-of-many-other-countries/.