Election Day Thoughts From A Teenager

So today’s the election, huh?
I know I’m just a teenager, but this does affect me in its little butterfly effect way. I’m still highly impressionable, and that’s what I told my mom when she asked my who I would’ve voted for had I gotten the chance this year. I couldn’t decide. I never can.
What if my vote ending up being one of hundreds that broke a tie, and the candidate I chose turned out to be nothing but talk? I realize how foolish it seems, but that’s how I feel; if all this “every-vote-counts” thing the media keeps pushing is true, that is.
And speaking of, as one pro-Obama ad states, “I feel like I was… Duped by Mitt Romney. I’m gonna vote for Barack Obama,” I feel duped by my own country’s media. That shouldn’t happen! Here I was, trusting every news station I came across, and then bias is suddenly added to the game. I knew of no such thing, or rather I chose not to pay attention to it, until this year. One article that sticks in my mind is from the last printed addition of Newsweek, which I believe was entitled ‘The Two Americas.’ It’s about the division between the media and how things are spun between them, including, especially, poll numbers. How do people even know if their candidate is winning, I wondered? It could all be lies. This started to really freak me out for a second, but I realized things could be a lot worse here, and are a lot worse in other countries.
What I really enjoy, though, is seeing how ads spin and attack the candidates. It’s hilarious. One thing in particular is Romney’s stance on birth control. I hadn’t really cared at first, because it didn’t pertain to me, but one day at school I got into a debate about it with two other girls. “Our rights would disappear!” “Everything we worked for would go down the drain. We might be set back a hundred years with Romney!” they reasoned. That last bit I knew I’d heard on a pro-Obama ad. Almost straight from it.
“So, what, he’d bar all birth control from entering the US? Is that what you’re saying?”
“Yeah. Wait. No.” I didn’t really know what the guy would do either, but the way she was talking, it sounded like he’d be a totalitarian slave master. I knew it couldn’t be like that. “I need my birth control. It makes my periods easier,” she explained.
I didn’t have much else in the argument fodder, so I said, “Listen. I’d rather go down in the history books being part of the second women’s rights movement than live in a box because Obama cut my dad’s job.”
When I asked my dad later about the birth control issue, I relished in getting my facts straight. But now that I realize it, election season, and politics in general, just makes for a bunch of unseasoned idiots that fight all the time. It can turn friend against friend, and that’s even worse than the normal fighting. Something, not directly related, but somewhat, my father said a few weeks ago disturbed me then and disturbs me still. “If he wasn’t a republican, do you think we’d be friends?” I of course love my father, but I couldn’t believe that he said that. Was he joking? I don’t know. Doth he speak the language of a learned man that I, a naive child doth not understand yet? I know not.
The ads, some created for the singular purpose of attacking one ad in particular, cause more confusion than illumination. And in doing so, they indirectly drive us nuts by causing unnecessary arguments. (Their mere existence can make a person insane, but that’s another issue)
Was Romney’s “getting rid of planned parenthood” really as ill-sounding as the ads made it out to be? Not quite, no. I hate how they only use little snatches, only what they need, and not the whole speech. It makes the candidates appear false to the general public, and that’s the last thing they need.
Oh well. My mom always says that there’s two things, when brought into an argument, you can never win against: Politics and religion. Preach Momma, preach.

This bracelet is just fun to play with. I think real Romney supporters might beat people with them like rulers.
(In actuality, I feel sorry for the candidates. What happens if they don’t win? Do they cry? Fall down on their beds and sleep for a month? Either way they need a big hug)