Whose to blame for apathy?

During my junior year of high school I made a decision that I thought would better my life. I applied to enter Advanced Placement United States Government and Politics. It was possibly one of the best choices I made. I, under no circumstances, get straight A’s but that was never the point. The point was to educate myself, to understand a little more about my government. I am well aware of the responsibility that I will be given in November and did not want to make a choice based solely on opinion or on instinct. I was accepted into the class and was only accompanied by eight other students.

I’ve heard older people talk about apathetic teenagers. My english teacher complains about students not having a ‘world view’, customers at the store I work at complain about magazines never talking about politics. I’ve seen countless shows advocating registering to vote, but I don’t think I really accepted the apathy of voting that is certainly present in the United States. How is it that our ancestors, our founding fathers would start wars in order to receive their independence but we, who have been gifted with this freedom of independence choose to do nothing about it? As it appears a majority of people don’t even care about voting.

School board elections could completely change how your children are taught, but who votes in those elections? I’m too aware that neither of my parents do, no matter how much I bug them about it. It angered me this year more than ever, because I was only months away from being able to vote. Which I see as such a huge privilege, yet my parents didn’t vote.

Primaries, though not usually so important, were incredibly important this year. I missed the chance to vote by ten days. If only I’d been born in January... and yet again did my parents vote? Nope. I really don’t understand. Sure my Dad is a republican who would have voted for John McCain, which probably wouldn’t have made much of a difference in the long run. But then their is my mother who is a die-hard Hillary Clinton voter, and she didn’t vote either. Yes, Hillary did win the primaries in New Jersey, so my mothers vote may not have made much of a difference in the long run either but their was always that chance. The chance that Barrack Obama could have beat her, the chance that Mitt Romney or Mike Huckabee would have gathered alot of strength and beat out the front-runners of New Jersey. Yet they felt no need to vote.

Maybe the country shouldn’t be so quick to glare at the teenagers. Maybe we’re not the ones to blame for the voter turnout. Perhaps the country should look at their neighbors and figure out who really travels a few blocks to vote. Who really takes their responsibility and does something about it.