As the election season reaches a fever-pitch, the lawn signs proliferate, and you get your fiftieth text from “Jean with Indivisible Action,” it becomes ever more important to remember that all of this content is designed to manipulate you.
Do not forget that the firehose of political content aimed directly at your brain stem is, in fact, bad for your health. After receiving hundreds (no exaggeration) of political flyers in the mail telling you to vote for the future of your country, your rights, your economic prosperity, your children, your community, your milkman, etc., don’t lose sight that these are designed to prey upon your well- founded and very legitimate anxiety about the future.
Everything from the Trump campaign ads backed by dramatic cello music telling you that inflation is Biden’s fault alone, to the fast-paced vertical iPhone aspect ratio Kamala ads backed by a vaguely latin-sounding hip- hop beat, are highly manicured and highly provocative pieces of media designed to compel you into action.
The messaging from both parties take on slightly different tones each election to account for changes in cultural attitude, and the messaging this year is noteworthy. After poring over millions (exaggeration) of political flyers from the Democratic party and Democrat- aligned interest groups, the general thesis of their messaging is something to the effect of, “Vote or you’re a horrible person with no friends.”
This is kinda mean. Democrats, stop being mean to us. Frowny face. We have homework and emails to worry about and you aren’t being very considerate of this fact. It’s such a degrading and harsh political messaging strategy, and the elusive “apathetic young voter” is probably not one to be swayed by self-appointed moral authority.
But the mere fact that your attention is so sought out by all these people should be evidence in itself that your vote matters. They wouldn’t bug you this much if it didn’t.
There is a tendency to slip into nihilism. Many of us have been born into an America we are not proud of; an America embroiled in perpetual foreign wars, one with legislature that seems increasingly dysfunctional, and where the quadrennial horse race for president is a little too reflective of the culture-war political talking points that do great on network T.V.
You probably have anxiety about the future. If you are a college student, you probably are anxious about the economy, the job market, and the climate. If you aren’t, you probably care about other things we young folk wouldn’t really understand, like Social Security.
But you should still vote. We here at the EdBoard plan to vote, some of us in far-away home states, and some right here in Pennsylvania. We believe you should too.
And if it makes you feel better, don’t tell yourself that you did it to “save our democracy” for the third straight election, or to “protect our future”, or even because Jean texted you that “4,864 of your neighbors already voted… and public records show you haven’t” (real text message). You should do it because you would rather see a world where one set of candidates hold positions of power rather than others.
Because the good news is that voting actually isn’t everything. The president isn’t actually the dictator of the universe, nor is congress, nor are your local representatives. A lot of the things you dislike about the government won’t (or rather, can’t) change in the span of four years. A lot of it, in fact, may never change.
But the bad news is that voting isn’t everything. Once you vote, you can’t pat yourself on the back and rest easy knowing that you saved democracy forever. You have to keep caring about the world every single day after that, and make the choices that improve the world around you. “Civic duty” means casting a ballot just as much as it means being kind to your neighbors. It means whatever you need it to mean. Nihilism is not the antidote to this grotesque barrage of political content that’s trying to poke the fear-response of your brain into action. The antidote is defining your political identity independent of the slick media savvy campaign messaging, and deciding what you individually care about in this world. You should vote because you want to, not because you have to.
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