Sixty-seven million people watched the Presidential Debate last Tuesday, which is 15.8 million more than who watched the one with Biden. I was one of those 15.8 million. It did plenty to reinforce my sense of disillusionment with American politics. But, I am attempting to fight back against the pull to let this disillusionment slip into complacency. That is especially difficult now that the school year has started. However, these next couple of months will be some of the most consequential of our lives. The ramifications of the upcoming Presidential election could be immense. So I would like to urge you, as I am urging myself, to stay vigilant and engaged in this political moment. Change is going to come either way, and we have to shape it.
For a lot of students, it can be easy to feel removed from the outside world while they’re living on campus. Back in June, I was not particularly interested in consuming news media at all. I was home from abroad, living with friends in Middlebury, processing vegetables and feeling newly held by my world. Mostly, I got updates on the chaos of the world from Instagram graphics and emails from my mom.
When Biden announced he was dropping out of the presidential race and Harris said she was stepping in, that lit a fire under me. I have a hunch this was true for a lot of young Americans, which was part of the reason for Harris’s entry into the race. I became the most informed about a current political moment that I’ve ever been. I listened to The Daily in the morning, followed by the entire hour of the Democracy Now broadcast. (My dear friend dubbed it Bad News Now.)
A little over a week into the semester and I’ve completely fallen off the news cycle. It is once again immediately obvious how easy it would be to live forever (or at least until next May) in this bubble of readings, friends, long dinners, good teachers, beauty, and abundance that is the shape of this fall. This is both the joy and failure of these small residential colleges — doing all the work of living and learning on the same patch of grass. The sense of isolation can be very alienting. “This is not the real world!” you may want to scream. “How can we be this disconnected from reality?!” The conversation about our strange, brief existence on this campus is ongoing. But I am feeling particularly aware of it, and agitated about it, in this political moment.
I did not watch the first presidential debate, but I did watch the second one. Trump’s rhetoric was unsurprising, horrifying, and — we cannot forget, as outrageous as his rhetoric may sound — rooted in a very real historical precedent of xenophobia. Harris was biting and on message, and also hypocritical and frustrating. How can she call for a ceasefire without promising to stop arming Israel? How in 2024 is the Democratic candidate for President running on the myth that it is in the best interest of this country’s working people, or even feasible, to continue fracking? The moderators, at least, were satisfying in their fact-checking.
As uninterested in the election as you may feel — because of the catastrophic failings of the Biden Administration with Gaza, because environmentally extractive industries like fracking have such a hold on Washington, or just because you feel consumed by your life on campus — it is essential to stay an active political citizen right now. In a particularly excellent episode of Democracy Now, Bill Ayer reminds us that voting is a “a practical, tactical move. It’s not a moral question; it’s a practical question.” Another good one that my friend said to me: “We’re choosing our opponent with this election.” We have to hold both those things in our heads, the strategy and the morals.
My call to you, no different than my call to myself, is to stay engaged. Make sure you have your absentee ballot. (It matters even if you’re not in a swing state because the sheer numbers of votes will add credibility to a victory.) If you’re in one of these seven swing states that will determine the election, talk to your parents about voting, talk to your neighbors, the people you went to highschool with. This kind of interpersonal mobilizing is what works, drawing on the strong connections that we already have. This is the time when it counts, not in two months and not after you graduate, as if somehow we don’t become political citizens until then. The privileges of our elite liberal arts school can do a lot to shield us from the outside world, but the change in this country will come for us all.
