As the two main political parties are choosing their nominees to be voted on in November, it is a good time to view the issues that are happening throughout the country. America is a country where you can do anything you want and have a happy life, but as one gets more knowledge in the reality of America, that facade slowly fades. We are a much stronger and united country than we used to be, although we still have many issues at hand that need to be addressed, and I am having a hard time seeing either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump quickly solve them.

First of all, both of the candidates are not going to be one of our best presidents because of the facades they have. On the democratic side, Clinton has had a tough time handling the investigation for the past two years on her private email server. She had sent and received over 100 emails that contained classified content through her personal server, which should have been on a government-owned server. If a normal citizen like myself had transmitted classified government material on a personal server, I would likely be put in jail for years, yet the former secretary of state got a free pass and wasn’t indicted. Second off, Donald Trump says he is for the American people, yet he has blatantly discriminated against many groups and races. He has previously stated that we should restrict muslims from entering the country, when America was founded from religious freedoms. He also is still going on with how there should be a wall built between the US and Mexico and Mexico should pay for it, which is outrageous, to the point where the former president of Mexico vulgarly attacked Trump for his proposal. It is true that there are bad Mexicans or muslims, but the same thing could be said for any race, religion, or heritage and going against an entire country or religion is absurd and arrogant. We will likely have either Trump or Clinton as president for the next four years, and they have a large amount of topics they need to address.

Private colleges and universities are continuing to educate the American youth, but at a staggering cost. I started going to Clarkson University in 2014 with a total yearly cost excluding financial aid of $52,000, and this upcoming year it has risen to about $60,000. Many private colleges are increasing prices continuously, although in the next decade there is going to need to be a cap, because if tuition continues to increase, the attendance is going to drop since most families won’t be able to afford to go to these universities. Over the next few decades, community colleges and state schools are likely going to extremely overpower private schools since they are going to be more affordable to all of America’s youth. As well with the youth, I worry about their safety into the future.

With mass shootings at places like churches, schools, movie theaters, and others, gun control in America is one of our biggest issues over the past few years, yet not much has been done to resolve it. I don’t want to have to tell my children in the future that they may not be safe in this country because politicians have yet to fix gun control. With the Democrats for restricting guns, and the republicans who side with the NRA against gun restriction, I am unsure of what it is going to take to stop this senseless violence. I am fully okay with someone owning a firearm for self defense or hunting game, but a normal US citizen does not need an automatic weapon for either of those cases, which usually is the type of weapon that you see in the news way too often. Gun control needs to be faced, or else this violence will continue to cripple our country.

The list of topics can go on and on, because even though there is a high potential for citizens of this country, there is many scrapes and scars we haven’t gotten over, and will unlikely get over in the next four to eight years. Many issues in our country will only be fixed by a large change in the mindset of our nation, which I’ve heard people say is impossible, but many of our nation's previous social and political leaders had this same issue that we needed to change the way we think and with continual push for a better country, they made change happen. The new leaders of our government will likely be unable to dramatically change our country, but they can start the progress of reforming it to become better and greater than it has ever been.