On Election Day, Some Things Are More Important Than Yourself

I’m not going to tell you to go vote today.

I can’t make you, and if you don’t want to vote, that’s your own choice.

I sent in my ballot a week ago. But if you’re still on the fence about going to the polls, I’m not going to fire up the rhetoric of hope or tell you that some presidential candidate will make America great again. I can’t fake that.

In fact, I’ll even admit that, if there were an election to break a person’s faith in democracy, this might be it.

One party has leaders that openly loathe their candidate and cling to him only because they think that they have to be team players in this election to survive in the next. The other party's candidate has been running for 30 years and was expected to win the nomination from day one.

One party was going to win all along. The other party is only in play because the talking heads have decided that when there are two parties, objectivity must be the midpoint between the two.

I feel resignation. The country feels resignation. This election is so bad that it has forced us to change our definitions of what bad actually means. It has turned Ted Cruz into a liberal savior and Bill Maher into a Bush defender. It has turned the Republican candidate for president into an admirer of a socialist from Vermont. It has turned racism mainstream and American exceptionalism into an afterthought.

This election has made millennials think their disillusionment is justified. We know that younger people generally don’t vote. But did you know that younger people consistently think far less of democracy than their elders? That statistically, nobody in the Western world cares less about democracy than the American millennial?

If you didn’t know that, are you even surprised?

In countries without the vote, people don’t really think about voting in the first place. They’re generally poorer and more desperate than us. They care about things like avoiding wars, going to university, and putting food on the table. It’s what young Americans think their lives are like.

It is only when you get the vote, however, that you realize how important it can be. Some of us come from communities where voting has not always been taken for granted. And we still consider the vote the bedrock right of a free society.

Voting matters. If you don’t like your leaders, you can vote them out. If you want to enshrine gender equality and freedom of conscience, steady democratic pressure wins every time. If you want to end segregation, you can’t change George Wallace’s mind, but with the vote you can sweep his career into the dustbin of history. And without the vote—as happened in real life—you can’t.

People who are disillusioned with voting—like many millennials—do not reject voting itself but the premise that voting alone is sufficient to change the world. I get it. Democracy sometimes seems like three wolves and a sheep voting on dinner.

But while voting is not sufficient, it is necessary. Without voting, the First Amendment wouldn’t mean a thing. Without voting, there would have been no Lincoln to back up equality with power and no Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson to remind us what equal protection of the laws really means. Without voting, our country cannot draw a line in the sand and say, “They will go no further.”

I will not tell you to vote in this election. I will not tell you whom you should vote for. But know that while the prospect of voting in this election might not fill you with enthusiasm, it should nevertheless make you care.

I believe our country will draw a line today. But I don't have platitudes to give you about healing. I have no idea how we can bridge our divides. We can’t turn back time, though. We have returned to our nation’s cardinal sin, and if we are to move past our sin, “we must see it all, and deal with it all.”

I can’t tell you to vote, and I can’t make you care. But there is one thing I do want to leave you with. Yes, this is the worst election cycle in modern history. But our problems are not unique. Every country has its divisions and its sins and its broken dreams. And in all of human history, there have only ever been two kinds of countries—the ones that solve their problems with votes and the ones that solve them with guns. Only the ballot allows us to avoid the bullet.

Winston Shi is a first-year student at Harvard Law School. His column appears on alternate Tuesdays. His only political endorsement this cycle is a quote from the Apostle Paul—“Blessed is the one who does not condemn himself by what he approves.”