We’re a year away from the next US presidential election and already there is universal desperation for change in this country, and through this country, the impetus for a better world. Judging from the broad spectrum of candidates who’ve thrown their hat into the ring, no doubt change is what we’ll get. The question for all Americans is: how drastically do you want things to change, and in which direction? And the only question all Americans must answer is, will you participate in the process of creating change, or will you sit this one out?
If you’re an American, the 2008 race may well be the election of your life. Don’t sit it out. Here is why:
If you are age eighteen to twenty-five, your head is spinning, wondering what happened to the America you hear older people reminisce about or of which you read in books. That America has not been your America. Since you were a child you’ve lived in a country increasingly party-divided, a country now coming off the closest two presidential elections in its recent history, which sequentially turned-out the highest voting populations ever. Not to mention, you were introduced to the political system via the 2000 Presidential election fiasco, likely making you wonder whether your country is not just as corrupt as some archetypal Latin American dictatorship south of the border, one we’ve historically been eager to overthrow. Furthermore, the bombardment of messages, technology, media hype, and digital devices that you have never known life to be without makes it nearly impossible to pay attention to anything, or believe what you do absorb. Yet you have unique ways of tuning in via the Internet, social media, and virtual group collaboration. You have the cynicism of youth on your side to improve your power of discernment. Now in your twenties, you have an opportunity to make your adult voice heard for, perhaps, the first time. Please use it.
If you’re thirty-ish or forty-ish, born in but too late to partake in the free-love-partying and political-rallying of the sixties and seventies, you’re still old enough to remember a bucolic, likely suburban upbringing when only one of your parents worked to provide a comfortable family life. A time before microwaves, cell-phones, the Internet and digital-everything, your childhood was filled with freedom; freedom from online pedophiles, freedom from overdeveloped land, freedom from terrorist attacks, and even the simple freedom of your mother not knowing where you rode your bike and hung out after school.
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