New Kid in Town
Posted by Scout
Just months ago, I stood in line in the Boston Commons, directly across the street from the dorm room I sit in everyday, to get a chance to see a speech by a presidential candidate. I recall the picture almost too clearly- my mental image of waves upon waves of vintage t-shirts, hippie skirts and sandals reminds me that it was still warm in Boston, a foreign concept indeed.
I, along with what appeared to be my entire school, had skipped out of class early to go see Barack Obama speak, live, in the flesh. My school is known for its focus on media and technology, so it wasn’t so much hearing him speak that caused us all to flurry to the park– any one of us could pull up a youtube video of him in half a heartbeat.
There was just something magical about him: something everyone had to see with their own eyes, if not just for themselves, but also to be able to say that had been there.
Having seen him speak twice, both in more private settings, I felt spoiled. There were so many people, so many young people, that I chose to step out of line and sit further away so that I might give someone else a chance to sit in front of the amplifiers and be hit more directly by the reverberations of his words.
And truthfully, I didn’t care. I was so in awe of my generation, of the number of newly-eighteen-year-old hands propping up “OBAMA ‘08″ signs, I thought I could almost be proud.
I remembered four years ago. You remember. That time when the young people were expected to have such a great impact on the vote? That time when the young people were supposed to act as the intelligent population (or was it the dissenting population?) and vote out our imbecile of a president? Remember how the young people just simply “forgot” to vote and how, if they had remembered, we might have an actual president, and not a buffoon, in office?
As I heard the unusually high-pitched drone of “O-Ba-Ma!” I couldn’t help but get excited. Could this be the year we finally do it? Could this generation of first-time voters, my generation, finally use that so-often-spoken-of-but-never-before-seen superpower we hold in the presidential elections process?
Months passed. Candidates blossomed from simple seeds into full people with ideas, sometimes beautiful and often times not. Affiliations were made. There was, as always, some flip-flopping. I did what I assumed all of my friends from the magical rally were also doing: filling out absentee ballots to send home so that their votes were not muted away at college.
After thanking the man at the post office for “helping to take away my voter virginity,” I skipped back to class (everyone in college loves to skip because we’re so happy all the time) and inquired with my peers, asking to which candidate they lost their voter virginity.
The responses were rather heartbreaking. I did not talk to one other person who had taken five minutes to fill out and send in an absentee ballot. Looking into the same eyes I had seen at the Obama rally, I was either laughed at or patted on the back and told, “Well, looks like you’re a better person than me.”
That was when I felt it. The anger I had felt towards the first timer’s stupidity and failure four years ago was now a large pit of shame in my gut. And today, the day known as “super Tuesday” to the adults who actually seem to care, I woke up with that pit feeling heavier than ever. I asked my friend, “did you vote?” to which he replied, “uhhh…when’s the primary in Connecticut? Oh, today? Oh…yeah I guess it’s too late.”
Too late was the feeling I had all day.
Until just now.
Arriving back at my dorm room, looking out the window into the very same Boston Commons, I read an article that I did not expect to see: “Record absentee ballots may delay Super Tuesday results.”
That’s right America- from what it appears, there’s a new kid in town, and his name is Eighteen-to-Twenty-five.
