Vote and be heard

Last week, I received a pleasant surprise in my mailbox: my Monroe County voter registration card. Immediately, I detached the card, signed it, proudly slid it into my wallet and tried to calculate how many days were left until the next election.\nI'm fully aware how ridiculously excited I seem about this dull, flimsy card; indeed, I am just as excited about voting today as I was the day I turned 18. But really, the only reason my display seems absurd is that few people in our age group take voting seriously.\nI know it's three years until the next presidential election, but it's never too early to register to vote or to start familiarizing ourselves with the issues.\nApproximately 59 percent of eligible voters between 18 and 25 years old are registered to vote. In the 2004 election, 47 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds voted, compared to 66 percent of those 25 and older. So while overall voter turnout is low, our age group is notorious for shirking our responsibilities as citizens.\nWhy don't young people vote? One of my former roommates confessed, "I don't know anything about the candidates." Others simply don't see the point, figuring that in a republic, individual votes don't really count for anything. And while this might be true with a small number of votes, if we, as a group, would vote in larger numbers, it could make a big difference.\nIt's no secret that the elderly turn out to vote in the highest numbers. And politicians, seeing this, focus more on that age group than ours when it comes to making and keeping campaign promises. So the way I see it, if we want to convince the government to help lower our tuition, we need to show that we're worth paying attention to.\nIs our age group so ahistorical that it does not realize why the voting age was lowered to 18? Ratified in 1971, the 26th Amendment lowered the voting age from 21 to 18 as our nation recognized the dichotomy of sending 18-year-olds to fight in Vietnam but not allowing them to vote. Our age group wanted the right to voice its concerns to the government and speak out on issues that concerned us the most. And while the 2004 election saw an increase in the number of college age voters, due in part to "get out the vote" campaigns and increasing concern about the war in Iraq, it still doesn't match the 55 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds who voted in the 1972 presidential election. \nWe have the opportunity to make the most powerful government in the world listen to our concerns. Why aren't we taking advantage of this occasion to make our voices heard? Are those brain-numbing reality TV shows so riveting that we can't take five minutes to log onto the Internet to see who's running for what office and what he or she stands for?\nConsider voting a part of our civic duty. After all, although we are young, we are Americans too.