This year's election seems to be causing chaos among the voter eligible world. It seems that there are a million different issues corresponding to each candidate, but there are far fewer answers, especially for new first time voters like myself. From a young age, politics have always interested me, so I feel as though it would be doing a major injustice to younger self not to vote. But it scares me that this is the path that many people may be choosing as November 8th fast approaches.
While trying to build my political identity as a young adult, I feel as though I've heard it all. Everyone likes to play the "he said, she said" game, and quite frankly, its juvenile. I did not imagine my first time voting would be this stressful, nor did I ever think I'd see grown adults argue over Facebook and Twitter the way I have seen it in these past months. I'd like think as adults, we could have civilized disagreements over important issues that do not end in racial or sexist slurs against each other. I think that this behavior comes about from being a massively uninformed or misinformed public. There are so many issues with relying on the information you learn from Facebook and Twitter, and more issue with using this information as an argument. It baffles me that some people seem to think that because they read a "popular opinion" on one of these platforms, they are suddenly political experts that can accurately advocate for their favored party. It should not be a matter of using social media to form our opinions for us, but rather we should form our opinion based on what we uncover after spending more than five seconds on more than one website or other media outlet. There is nothing wrong with using Facebook and Twitter as methods of obtaining information, but perhaps we should be more conscious of what we are reading, and should become friendly with fact checkers to ensure we are reading both sides of the story.
Here's where things get messy: those people, only informed by one opinion they scrolled past on Facebook or Twitter are the same people who will cast their vote on November 8th. Does anyone else not see the issue with this? What happened to taking personal interest in what our great country will turn out to be after the election is over? What is so hard about going on an unbiased website and discovering the truth versus the lies social media forces us to look at? Have we become so lazy and careless that we allow biased information to be spoon-fed to us, hoping that we will make the "right" decision on election day? Essentially, if taken for granted, becomes a propaganda tool, both for candidates, as well as for voters. After seeing only one side of the issue, people tend to conclude with a sense of helplessness. This sense of helplessness may cause people to feel like their vote does not count, but they could not be more wrong. Everyone's votes count, so we should all feel compelled to make a decision on election day 2016.
