First kiss, first car, first vote

Today feels like a pretty ordinary day, doesn’t it? I think it must be the normality of this… Today feels like a pretty ordinary day, doesn’t it? I think it must be the normality of this peaceful transfer of power via choice of the people that makes us take it for granted. As the iconic pictures of beaming Iraqis with purple-stained fingers remind me so powerfully, what we do today remains an enviable dream for many.

Yet so many of us on this campus will not vote today. I do not join the chorus in chastising apathy. Societal forces shape individual attitudes, and I believe our collective society has not fully demonstrated the power of partaking in our democratic process. I believe that we can do better.

We are certainly not a selfish generation, “iPod” labels be damned. The searing images of Sept. 11, 2001, the 2004 tsunami and Hurricane Katrina have reinforced a collective desire to reach out to others. Record numbers of students are signing up for stints in service organizations like Teach for America and tutoring programs like Jumpstart number among the most popular at Pitt. There seems to be a desire to circumvent the nasty bureaucracy of government and affect change on a grass-roots level. There is also the satisfaction of personally seeing the effect of your efforts — a letter to your congressman about global warming just can’t produce the same satisfaction that comes from spending a morning voluntarily cleaning up South Oakland. Service seems to stand as one of the few truly bipartisan values, with presidents Clinton and Bush both borrowing from JFK’s “Ask not…” playbook to implore young people to devote significant amounts of time to serving their communities.

So where is the same call from our leaders to truly devote ourselves to voting and volunteering for political candidates we support? They seem content to let people continue to prescribe to the Reaganite view of government being the problem, not the solution, in favor of a more active role of charity in alleviating social ills. Yet anyone working in the nonprofit sector can attest to the fact that all the altruism in the world can amount to very little without the proper amount of support and funding from the government. As cleansing as it may feel for the soul to sweep up a weekend’s worth of partying on McKee Street, a volunteer effort cannot make a fraction of the difference of a government-backed, sustained effort like the late Mayor Bob O’Connor’s “Redd Up” campaign.

Without any interest in combating the greater sources of our social and economic woes with a concentrated government effort, we will only be leaving a legacy to our children of more crappy streets to clean up and more unacceptable, failing schools to tutor in. My fear is that a decreased interest in government represents a threat to our way of life on par with any act of terrorism, one that will reduce our generation to a latter day Sisyphus continually damned to rolling the boulder up the hill only to have it roll back down eternally.

We need to drastically rethink how we present the act of voting. We celebrate the milestones of the first kiss and first car — why not print the names in local hometown newspapers of all those who honor their right to vote for the first time? Why not hold elections on Veterans Day so that people don’t have to choose between working and voting, so that we can honor our veterans’ sacrifice not just by waving the flag at parades but also by actively participating in what they bravely defended?

We’ve all heard about the big push to emphasize math and science in the classroom so that our students can better compete with China and India. I’d like to see a similar push for better, more challenging civics education that allows students to think creatively about how best to create policy for various problems and empowered student governments that allow representatives to have more responsibilities than just where to hold the senior prom.

Doubtless, the campaign hype has just begun to appeal to voters who are locked out because the deadline to register has passed. Why not allow for same-day registration? Or why require registration at all? We don’t have to go sign up to receive a Social Security number, after all. Or the schools could help out — most schools now require a certain amount of hours of volunteering before students can graduate. Why not include voter registration in these requirements?

Service will always be a noble and important aspect of civic life, but it should not be viewed as an alternative to democratic solutions — it should be perceived as a means of glimpsing firsthand the conditions of different paths of life so that we can be more enlightened in our discussion of the best means of combating these issues. It simply makes no sense for our nation to honor the sacrifices of those going overseas to defend our freedom if we are not willing to cross the street to the poll to practice it.

Vote Daron at djc14@pitt.edu.