Collegiate Times

Couple all this with the fact that words have become basically meaningless. I'm told by an advertisement to exercise my rebelliousness ... by purchasing a soda. When I was 12 years old a company dared me to be different, to buy a pair of pants that was, at the time, common as dust, lint. It's not just that we young people don't believe politicians; we don't believe words. Maybe even can't. Examples abound. A bag of artificially preserved potato chips claims to be all-natural. A politician lies by saying he'll tell the truth. We see this stuff daily, and it makes us tired and hurt, and the best choice often seems to be: tune out.

(Sometimes, events force us to come to grips with words. In late April, 2007, a friend said he'd shoot me an e-mail, and later kept apologizing for having said shoot, since we had both recently understood anew what that verb actually meant.)

Here's the equation: Young people don't trust politicians, or words, and it's never been easier to just check out and live in self-created, self-reinforcing worlds.

Asked why they don't care about politics, some of my freshmen feel they themselves don't make a difference. They can do the math: This country's got 300 million people. What's a one-three-hundred-millionth stake worth?

So, what's the answer?

We have to have what's probably best called courage. We have to believe our voices matter, despite overwhelming evidence that all words are lies and mean nothing. It's that boring and simple.

We have to choose -- despite how infinitely easy it is to tune out with our iPods -- to only read news we agree with, to refuse to engage with the words around us because they're meaningless -- to take part in something larger than ourselves. The worst part is that voting's like flossing: the benefit is an absence of badness. Flossing leads to fewer cavities. Of course, flossing doesn't automatically lead to fewer cavities, just as voting won't automatically make the country into the place we want it to be.

But, for sure, the country won't become the place we want it to be if we don't vote. Think of that Eskimo. We can sit in this whirlpool forever, astounded by our gathered gadgetry, blissful in the little worlds we've created for ourselves, or we can come out and look around, meet and talk with each other, engage with the world around us. There isn't a "right" answer, but only one answer will begin to change the way it feels to be alive right now. Vote.

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