One of the wonderful things about turning 18 is the many milestones that come your way quickly.
Some of them aren’t necessarily a cause for joy such as now being considered an adult in the eyes of the law meaning that any faux pas/screw ups/mistakes now have far more far-reaching ramifications and potential penalties.
For men, turning 18 means also registering their availability for the draft via Selective Service. There was a recent challenge to that requirement by the ACLU seeking to require registration for Selective Service by women but that case recently went down in flames and so the registration requirement is still only for those of us in the XY-chromosome club.
Given how much one stands to lose for failing to register for Selective Service (particularly given that eligibility for Federal financial aid can be denied) and many personal reasons why registering was not optional, this is one task I insisted we do together much in the same way that my father handed me that post card for registering that was in vogue many years ago.
Granted, we could have let NC DMV do this as part of getting the regular Class C driving licence and I’m sure they’d have done a bang-up job at it but this one was personal and that requires personal attention to the detail. 🙂
One thing Nicholas did allow DMV to do as part of getting the lience is register him for yet another milestone…becoming an eligible member of the American electorate.
His voter registration card arrived today and it didn’t take long to show him the relevant bits of the card as well as show him the horrifying reality that his voter registration information is a publicly accessible record available on the Internet.
Welcome to the grid…you’re well and truly on it now! 😉
What he chooses to do with that vote is entirely up to him but the fact that he now has the right to cast a ballot in an election and take a political stand on the issues and candidates of the day is a sacred trust that has been paid for in the dearest coin this nation has ever known.
To be sure, one vote may not mean much against the millions of dollars of wealthy political donors who are far more likely to get the attention and obedience of the political candidates. And I’m sure at some point he wonder why it is a felony for him to sell his vote when the politicians are paid thousands (or millions!) of dollars to effectively sell their vote to the highest bidder.
But that one vote combined with another vote and another can occasionally move mountains as we’ve seen in a recent election in 2020.
More importantly, now he has the incentive to pay attention to what the politicians and their wealthy benefactors are up to now that he’s not only a taxpayer but also a voter who can have a direct impact on those issues.
I don’t think we have to worry about him choosing not to vote…he’s certainly had opinions on politics well in advance of his 18th birthday and I suspect he’ll have them long afterward.
But whatever his opinion and whatever candidates and/or political parties he might choose to support, it is my hope that he will exercise that right to vote and do so as an *INFORMED* voter. Or at least as informed as one can be when there is not much in the way of non-biased information available during the election cycle.
To be sure, he’s going to find that the quality of candidates on offer is generally lacking compared to earlier generations and that it’s not about statesmanship, leadership, and solving problems so much as it is a matter of picking the tribe that will win you the political office. He may well find himself confronted with a ballot where the choices being offered are selected whilst one is holding their nose and picking the lesser of the evils whilst looking for that unicorn on the ballot being someone who is competent, hasn’t been bought and paid for, and actually seems to care about the little people and their well-being.
And if that wasn’t bad enough…trying to find the truth amongst the spin and BS in the media can be a full-time job in and of itself.
That’s the part about democracy that sucks. And making matters worse is that it isn’t pure democracy (which would lead to chaos at best) but representative democracy meaning that the number of constituents for the average national office holder means that views of individuals are rarely taken seriously compared to the massive bribes offered by political donors and political action committees.
With that in mind, there may be times where his vote may well agree with my choices. Then there are the times they may not and we find ourselves canceling out each other’s vote.
That doesn’t matter at the end of the day.
What does matter is taking a public stand and being willing to defend the reason for the choices that were made.
That is the true power of the ballot and the main reason that of the many rights we enjoy as citizens of the United States of America…the right to vote in a free and generally fair election with the dream of effecting political change is perhaps one of the most sacred of them all. 🙂