Students
should mock the vote
David
Weigel
It
was fall 2000 and as a volunteer for the
Ralph Nader campaign and a fresh Associated
Student Government senator, I had been urged
doubly to register my classmates to vote.
Bright-eyed Associated Student Government
leaders had sent the necessary forms back
to my dorm, and for more than a week, I
badgered students I hardly knew with talking
points on why they needed to vote and what
was at stake.
Looking
back, I’m a little embarrassed. I
know why I did it: We politically obsessed
students truly believed voting was vital
and our classmates had to do it to save
our souls from Dante’s sixth circle.
Smarmy foreigners use our low turnout to
prove America is in a downward spiral. Activists
say young people are screwed by the government
because they don’t bother to vote.
But
it doesn’t particularly matter whether
Northwestern students vote. It doesn’t
matter to the world at large and it doesn’t
matter to our Evanston neighbors. In fact,
the vote you cast for your favorite American
Idol may have more bearing on your life
than the vote you cast for president.
For
starters, as a NU student you have next
to nothing at stake in a national election.
You go to a private school, so you won’t
feel the effect of a reeling education budget.
You probably don’t pay taxes; if you
do, you’re in the lowest bracket,
and neither party is going to shake you
down.
Does
George W. Bush make you worry about war
or a draft? Well, John Kerry doesn’t
plan on pulling us out of Iraq, and Democratic
congressmen like Rep. Charles Rangel of
New York are the only ones talking about
military conscription. Do you want to smash
the World Bank? As any member of Peace Project
or the Objectivist Club could tell you,
either party is going to follow basically
the same capitalist policies.
The
issues that fire up most Northwestern University
students — abortion rights, globalization,
gay marriage, war and peace — currently
aren’t affecting us directly. At the
moment, we’re hovering in a rarefied,
moneyed nirvana where political problems
crop up as ideas to be studied. When we
vote we’re playing around with decisions
that will have a bigger impact on other
people.
The
other people can take care of themselves
and they do. Evanston votes solidly for
liberal Democrats in the state House, state
Senate and U.S. House, typically giving
the Republicans a lopsided defeat. The reason
for encouraging students to vote that was
offered in a recent Rolling Stone article
— that “keeping turnout down
among voters at one major college campus
in each battleground state could tip the
election to the Republicans” —
doesn’t apply here.
Even
the reasons for voting in a local election
are a little specious. Would throwing our
weight against one alderman or another really
do more for the way Evanston treats us than,
say, donating our time to helping at a local
church or school?
I
wouldn’t suggest that students actually
restrain their friends from voting. Punching
a vote card isn’t going to get anyone
hurt. But it’s rude to assume your
love of politics must be forced upon your
peers. If they don’t want to vote,
they’ve got nothing to lose.
This
column originally appeared in The Daily
Northwestern of Northwestern University.
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