It sounds naive to hope Gen Y voters will show up in 2018 to claim their power as a third of the American electorate. Gen X is the next largest group of non-voters who need to get off their dead asses but historically won’t. Both generations have the most to gain by disrupting the status quo and the most to lose by staying home. The two groups represent two-thirds of eligible voters and less than one-third of those who actually show up.
The choice seems obvious to me regardless of whatever local challenges exist that might keep you from voting. Is it really a choice? If your family were starving and you needed an ID or to force a day off from employers legally obligated to provide it in order to ensure you always had food wouldn’t you do whatever it took? Voting is the very least we can do to ensure a dynamic America geared for 21st century opportunities rather than 20th century failures.
Voter suppression tactics, created to make our self-imposed powerlessness permanent, are only effective if we keep not voting. It’s a sad fact that voters under fifty have a pathetic 28% turnout by demographic in every election and half of those who do vote skip primary elections. Voters over fifty? Like God damn metronomes, showing up with ticktock certainty to keep steering the ship straight into the rocks of cultural wars none of us had a hand in creating or fighting.
Irony remains our biggest enemy.