It’s depressing reading about young people’s apathy when it comes to voting. Hope should flourish in that age group, and yet the reason for their despair is plain: Debt is all they can see when it comes to their future, if not homelessness.
It’s not that Biden has no idea what’s to be done. He would have shored up the middle class through readjusting the inequitable tax system, he would have strengthened families, he would have expanded health care, and he would have lessened the effects of climate change were it not for the objections of one or two benighted senators in his own party, who apparently have sabotaged these worthy, nay critical, goals. One wonders how one person can get away with scuttling an emissions-cutting policy that, if implemented, might help avert an environmental catastrophe.
“He’s condemning his own children,” Leah Stokes, a University of California Santa Barbara environmental policy professor, said of Joe Manchin in a New York Times story last week, the day after his demurral.
So, yes, I would say to America’s young people, especially to the 46 percent who in a recent poll said they preferred a Democratically-controlled Congress, by all means vote. I would advocate wholesale removal to battleground states, to Arizona, North Carolina, Georgia, or Florida, say, though there probably is no housing there, or if there is, it’s out of reach.
And by all means don’t forget to lobby for the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, which the District of Columbia and 15 states — Maryland, New Jersey, Illinois, Hawaii, Washington, Massachusetts, Vermont, California, Rhode Island, New York, Connecticut, Colorado, Delaware, New Mexico, and Oregon — have already approved.
Abandoning the antiquated Electoral College system can happen. Reportedly, the national one-person-one-vote effort, whose ratifiers’ electoral votes must equal the 270 needed to elect a president, is almost three-quarters of the way there.
Don’t give up, don’t give up on your country.