Step up and vote

It has been said that this upcoming election is one of the most important elections in United States history. Our country is in desperate need of a strong leader who can shape up all of the chaos and turmoil occurring in the United States today and around the world.

Not only is this election an important one but also the elected president could potentially make history. Among the candidates at the 2008 Democratic Presidential Candidate Debate there is one woman, Sen. Hillary Clinton, one African American, Sen. Barack Obama, and one Hispanic, Governor Bill Richardson debating to become the next president of the United States. Former Governor of Massachusetts, Mitt Romney is running for the Republican Party and would be the first Mormon president.

As college students, we lead busy lives; some busier than others. Some of you may think that your vote doesn’t count, so why should you waste your time researching candidates and watching debates on TV?

It’s a lot easier now to find out about the candidates and their viewpoints with the Internet. New statements arise each week from the hopeful presidential candidates and it’s extremely important to stay up-to-date with them. There has been some flipflopping of interests and statements made already and we’re only in the early stages. If you keep up with all of the issues, it will be a lot easier for you to decide on a candidate when it comes time for the primaries.

People understand that FOX and CNN news programs are biased towards a particular political party, so it’s not surprising that students turn on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart or The Colbert Report with Steven Colbert. It is important that students watch news programs that cater to a political party that might not be their own so that they are getting the whole picture because the media can be one sided.

In a meeting with Howard Dean, he couldn’t have praised our generation enough. He said that we have accomplished more in our time then his generation has. In reality, statistics show that younger voters aren’t voting.

Fact is, every vote counts and if you remember the previous election in which Florida had to recount their votes to come up with a winner because the votes were so close we found out that every individual vote does count.

As college students, we should be the people voting. The next president will be responsible for getting our country out of the worst debt it has ever been in. If the wrong candidate is elected into office, we could be paying the consequences later on.

As for the war in Iraq, it’s our generation who is mostly over in Iraq fighting a war that Howard Dean said was unnecessary and that is making our world a more dangerous place. The number of casualties is increasing every month so why should we keep shipping our loved ones over to the Middle East to fight in a war that is unnecessary and making our world a more dangerous place? We need a president that will put America back in the right direction.

It’s easy to complain about the problems in the United States today and blame politicians for the situation we find ourselves in but if you don’t vote, then you don’t have the right to complain.