Election Day

Did anyone else watch the big game on Tuesday? It was like the Super Bowl, the World Series, and the Olympics all tied into one, and my team had to finally just win one. They just had to. I didn’t care that the commercials stretched the game to four hours, or that I had to stare passively at the television screen like a zombie. I was going to see to it that the Democrats took over Congress.

And they did! Can you imagine how wonderful our lives are going to be now that the Dems have control of both houses of Congress? We’ll get out of Iraq and Afghanistan! We’re going to have universal healthcare! I bet they even make pot legal!

Please don’t think that Democrats are actually going to do anything that impressive in these two years of power just because you and me voted for them. Beyond carrying out the important task of investigating all the crap that has happened in the past six years, you and know they will do very little. Remember, these are the same Democrats who lined up with the rest of us in favor of this war, the same ones who are in bed with corporations and lobbyists, and the same ones who believe in apple pie and Christmas sweaters and God.

Take, for example, one of the Dems we’re supposed to be excited about winning on Tuesday. Jim Webb of Virginia served in the Reagan administration, wrote a long-winded essay about why women shouldn’t be allowed in the Navy, and wasn’t even a Democrat until this election. I bet you won’t even hear about this guy the entire time he’s in the Senate.

Don’t get me wrong, though. I’m definitely glad they won. I voted for those goobers too after all. If you helped one of them get elected by working on a campaign, I admire your dedication, I really do. I just don’t think I’ll ever be able to have faith in some deustchbag with a power tie and a politician’s hair-do.

I bet many people our age share these reservations about politicians. It’s hard not to when you have robots who look like they may have gone to college about ten years ago running all of our student governments. They do fantastic imitations of the people they’re going to be ten years from now.

Yet, can we expect the people running this country to act any differently than our student government tools? They have to get money from people who are even bigger shitheads than they are, appeal to a bunch of local yoohoos, and wear humongous grins for the cameras at all times. Right now, our system can’t possibly turn out anyone who is still a living, breathing person.

We should therefore agree that voting does not a democracy make. Until we have a media with beneficial coverage and free access, an educational system that gives everyone an equal opportunity to think clearly, and a health care system where money doesn’t influence your health, we’ll never be able to elect anyone who will really do anything.

Really, then, the voter apathy among college students is not caused by how stupid some of us are (although I’m sure anyone who’s taken a class with 500 people may disagree). It rather comes from a realization that we’ve collectively made about how useless our political system is right now. We realize that no politician could possibly change anything, so we don’t really care all that much about politics.

And, oh man, do we not care about politics. The Daily Texan ran a jubilant article on Election Day which declared enthusiastically that a whole third of us College Students were “definitely going to vote.” We even had a chance to approach the record-setting numbers of 1982, days of campus protest, chaos, and upheaval.

So what does that make those of us who cast our ballots this past Tuesday? It’s hard to tell, because we definitely don’t conform with the rest of our peers. We could be several different types of people. Voting makes me into a sociopath who would just as soon see all the people in line behind me wiped off the Earth without a trace; it also makes me into a geek who has enough spare time to watch the boring-ass news everyday; and it also makes me into a rebel with the determination necessary to pass through the gauntlet of meatheads to actually care about our world. I may even be a naïve schoolgirl who wholeheartedly believes in American democracy.

It’s going to be damn interesting to read history textbooks about this era in the future. Will we escape the suits, the money, and the trends of today, or are these days just the beginning of a fully virtual democracy a la any futuristic dystopia you want to quote? All in all, Tuesday probably won’t be remembered as the day that swung the balance in any particular direction.