Editorial: Budget cut protesting too little, too late

I

t’s a great thing to have passion, but if you don’t implement your passion at the right… It’s a great thing to have passion, but if you don’t implement your passion at the right time and in the right way, it does no one any good.

As state governments across the country (including Pennsylvania) continue to respond to budget pressures by proposing cuts to higher education, college students are seriously — and rightfully — agitated. Cut-induced tuition hikes seem like the last thing students need to deal with as they prepare for an unemployment-ridden job market and compete in a globalizing world. So it makes sense to rally. It makes sense to raise your voice — either literally or electronically — and it makes sense to be mad. No one will stop you — passionate expression of dissent at the steps of state capitols is a healthy, inalienable exercise.

But don’t be fooled. However many signs and megaphones you arm yourself with in the coming months, you shouldn’t forget about the weapon you chose not to pick up, what would have been the most important cause to your name — the vote.

CBS News reported last year that only 9 percent of young people aged 18 to 29 showed up to the polls in the 2010 midterm election. This was the election that swept Republican governors and legislative majorities into state governments, the policymakers from which higher education cuts have largely stemmed. Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Corbett heads only one of many Republican-led and cut-friendly states — others include Minnesota, Nevada, Idaho and Michigan.

Blue-leaning young people can exert powerful influence over elections — the extraordinary 2008 ascension of former first-term Sen. Barack Obama to the White House is a case-in-point. In that regard, if youth participation in the 2010 midterms would have deviated only slightly from 2008 levels instead of plummeting as it did, who knows what would have happened? But alas, the reality is that we skipped voting day, and it’s no wonder that the state governments we didn’t vote for are cutting our funding.

Although it’s important to understand how we got ourselves here, letting that realization deflate our plans to protest the higher education cuts would be self-defeating. Students of state and state-related schools might have negligently left the fate of their education hanging dangerously close to the Republican budgetary ax, but let us not define stupidity by welcoming the blade with open arms of silence and stoicism. The music is far from over, but we’re certainly dancing without legs.