Angela Bacca

On September 11, 2001, I was a high school sophomore at a Catholic school on the Central Coast of California. Being 3000 miles away from ground zero, I probably did not take the situation with as much seriousness as I should have.

We loved 9/11, at first. We got out of all of our classes, and it was definitely more entertaining than September 10. A friend and I jokingly talked about a movie that would be made in the future - a love story- the woman in tower one and a man in tower two reaching out to each other and proclaiming their undying love as the towers go down. (Incidentally, Oliver Stone made that movie, sans the melodramatic love scene, a couple years later).

We shouldn’t have been laughing about the situation. Today her husband is in Baghdad, fighting for the U.S. Army. My generation faces a $9 trillion debt, mounting personal debts, no health care, and I don’t feel any safer, if anything I think we have simply proliferated terrorism.

Both Republicans and Democrats vying for the presidency have all admitted that the last 7 years in this country have been nothing short of a disaster.

During the recent Republican debates in Florida, the candidates were all given 30 seconds to answer the question of whether or not they believed the war in Iraq was worth the “blood and treasure it has cost us”. All of them, with the exception of Ron Paul, either skirted the question or gave an indirect answer about the popularity then and now for the war.

Guiliani stated, and was echoed by McCain and Romney, that although the American public is now against this war, they would not back down. It is about winning this war, not whether the people want to fight it anymore. Even when the polls change, they will stay the course.

The American public may have supported the war in 2003, largely in part because we were misinformed. As it turns out, there were no weapons of mass destruction, and so our opinion changed. As our elected representatives, theirs should have too.

Do they really think that is what we want to hear, “Sit back and trust us, because you are too ignorant to know what is good for you”?. We live in a democracy (kind of), and I could only hope if the majority of the American people wanted something, it would be our government’s duty to do it. As the government of a democracy, we sign their paychecks, they are our employees. Did we forget that these people work for us? Clearly, they have. We forget that, in the international game of chess, we are the pawns, playing the king well saves lives.

The reason all these filthy old men are allowed to play the “sit back and trust me” game is because we don’t vote.

According to the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (IDEA), the United States ranks 139 in voter turnout percentage, with an average of 48% of us turning out for elections since 1945. No wonder the leader of the free world never acts as such.

If we really want change, we need to prove it. The way we have been picking our president is like employing a business with employees we didn’t care to interview. This election should be about understanding our global position, because knowledge is what will prevent another 9/11 and a subsequent Iraq in the future.