College Students Should Be Politically Active

Ursula Muñoz Schaefer/Assistant Opinion Director

It’s the start of a new semester, and with that comes new excuses for dodging the crowds of petitioners, voting recruiters and blood donors swarming the busiest corners of our campus. 

If you’re wary of them, you’ll be further peeved off by the students who use these activists as an excuse for their own political apathy.

A little less than a year ago, I wrote an article attempting to find an interesting angle within the 2018 midterm elections. I focused on the pesky people walking around our university trying to get students to register to vote, argued that a more personable approach would get them to do so and cited a professor whose energy helped students realize the urgency of being politically active.

I’ve found myself thinking more and more about this topic recently, especially in the wake of so many petitioners hanging around the Green Library.

Students have every right to not want to sign a petition or give personal information to a stranger. I don’t like doing it and I feel myself tense up whenever I walk past the area, just waiting to be approached by a petitioner making a beeline for me.

But slamming them is really a lame excuse for many students’ lack of political interest.

In the days leading up to midterms, I had a classmate who said he had been approached at the door of his dorm by a recruiter who wouldn’t leave. Although it made me laugh at the time, his retelling of the incident worried and later irked me; he seemed apathetic towards our increasingly troubling current events, and the anecdote seemed like his way of justifying that.

Millennials and Generation Zers have expressed a lack of interest in politics since the 2016 presidential elections, thanks in part to the toxicity brought on by politicians and their supporters on either side and even within parties. But that doesn’t justify inaction. 

The truth is, we should all be more politically active. If you don’t vote on topics like net neutrality, human rights, reproductive rights, the environment and so on, you have no reason to complain when things don’t go your way with the election of someone who doesn’t hold the same values you do.

I opened last year’s article by quoting the then-relevant Instagram post from pop star Taylor Swift, who up until that moment had become something of a poster child for the undecided millennial after remaining silent throughout 2016’s election cycle.

A year later, she’s dropped an album drawing political metaphors from high school horror movies, spoke out about turning her privilege into activism during the Trump era and slammed him in an interview with The Guardian, vowing to do “everything I can for 2020.”

Her case resembles that of many people waking up and realizing the consequences of remaining politically mute.

Taking responsibility for not taking action at a time that requires it of us is important. So is voting, even if the people telling us to do so aren’t doing it in the most effective way.

And who knows? Maybe listening to what some of the activists and petitioners on our campus have to say could help enlighten us on topical issues, even if we don’t always sign. At the end of the day, what we advocate for or don’t is our decision and nobody else’s, so blaming others for our inertia is always going to be a foul move.

Featured photo by Ursula Muñoz Schaefer.

 

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The opinions presented within this page do not represent the views of PantherNOW Editorial Board. These views are separate from editorials and reflect individual perspectives of contributing writers and/or members of the University community.