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As an American citizen, living in this modern society, it is your right and your duty to vote.
Representative democracy was created with the purpose of ensuring that all citizens, from the uneducated to the privileged, could have a voice in the governmental decisions that directly affect their lives.
So many people are denied this right in the modern world, even to this day.
Totalitarian
or monarchial states exercise their governments from the perspective
that the common people, the governed, do not possess the necessary
qualifications to control their own destiny.
For some
reason, the leaders of these countries think government by the consent
of the governed is too chaotic, too unstable to function successfully.
They
believe their own citizens are incapable of making the decisions that
would best benefit the country as a whole, and therefore deny them the
right to exercise any voice in the government which rules over their
interests.
The end
result of this is oppression, and it occurs because the governments of
these nations do not rule with the consent of the governed.
They feel their citizens are either too uneducated or too unpredictable to rule themselves, so they make decisions for them.
These decisions are not always in the citizens’ own best interests, obviously.
In
America, the Constitution guarantees a right to all Americans,
regardless of education or capability, to make a decision about how
they want to be represented.
We have a voice.
We are
given this voice for a reason, so that each of us, from the lowest to
the greatest, has a right to make his or her voice heard.
The
argument that people who are not educated, or tend to be ignorant, do
not have the right to vote is both aristocratic and contrary to the
American spirit.
The
input of Americans from all walks of life and all educational and
intellectual perspectives has not served to this country’s detriment
from any historical perspective.
In the years since this country was founded, it has evolved from a simple backwater colony to the dominant power worldwide.
It has
done so, not by ignoring the voices of the less-educated or the
less-informed, but by embracing the input of each and every voter.
Certainly, mistakes have been made in the past.
Not every president has done a good job.
The system, however, tends to correct itself.
James Buchanan, a Democrat, failed to avert the Civil War, and this failure gave rise to a Republican triumph under Lincoln.
By the
same token, the failures of George Bush Sr.’s policies begat the
presidency of Bill Clinton, widely perceived to be a successful one.
The mistakes made when the will of the people is ignored tend to be far worse.
Historically,
the errors made in totalitarian systems of government tend to be far
more excessive than those in which citizens are given a chance to
correct their mistakes, by voting poor leaders out of office.
America needs to hear the voices of all its citizens.
We all have the right to vote, and we should all exercise it.
Jeff Koehler, a senior journalism major from Greensboro, is a news reporter.
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