I won’t sugar coat it: in the eyes of many left-leaning Americans, our world is dark right now. Between the seemingly omnipresent police violence, the million lives lost globally to the coronavirus, the looming election and the passing of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, 2020 has been a mentally taxing year, especially for the marginalized communities disproportionately affected by these crises.

Waking up every day with bad news repeated over and over again on your timeline is exhausting. I and many other young people have found ourselves losing hope in the democratic systems that are supposed to help us.

I’m here to beg you not to. Giving up on democracy and the future of the United States is one of the biggest decisions that could make our world even worse than it is now. You can be angry, you can be sad, you can hate the way things are being done, but if you don’t put that energy into creating change, it’s meaningless.

People consistently joked in 2016 that they would move to Canada if Donald Trump was elected president. Leaving a place where you’re in immediate danger makes sense, but the privileged people making those jokes didn’t realize that, if they did theoretically leave, they would hurt the low-income, marginalized people who are actually in danger. Your upper-middle-class white family leaving the country because you dislike Trump’s policy is selfish. You need to be here to fight with all of your privilege.

The same thing is happening now. I see constant messages on Instagram stories that say the system doesn’t work, there’s no hope for better, we’ve failed, on and on. Those who share these posts don’t realize that they’re doing exactly what keeps young people from voting: making them feel like they don’t matter.

Yes, the electoral college can make some votes more important than others and yes, the system has been formed in a way that consistently hurts our most vulnerable populations, but how are we going to change that if we don’t exercise our rights to have a voice at all?

Current events affect how young people develop their political beliefs and values, a process known as political socialization, said Emily Thorson, an assistant professor of political science at Syracuse University.

These events also inspire strong passion. Typically, when something is going very wrong, more people have things to say about it. Anger is a very motivating force, Thorson said. We can see this theme ring true in past and present crises.

The Vietnam War got people out in the streets, fighting for deescalation. There have been 125 days of protests since Minneapolis police officers hatefully killed George Floyd. In my hometown of Rochester, hundreds of people have been taking to the streets nightly to protest the police killing of Daniel Prude.

“This is not the first time something like this has happened,” Thorson said.

Being a young person is hard. We’re trying to figure out who we are, what we believe and where we want to go in life. The constant negative stream of information is valuable in creating a very informed generation, but it has also made an exhausted, burnt-out one. Climate anxiety, racial injustice and consistent fear for our future plague us. I know because I’m right there with you.

But we can’t change those problems if we don’t do the work.

There is hope. We saw it in the New Deal era, in the civil rights movement, in the election of former President Barack Obama in 2008. We have lived hope. We have seen same-sex marriage become legalized, youth organizers impact gun reform, women’s marches pop up across the globe and climate strike leaders speak at the United Nations. Who’s to say that you won’t be the next example of that hope?

In the words of soul legend Sam Cooke, “it’s been a long, a long time coming, but I know a change gon’ come.” His hope in the middle of the civil rights movement is something we can draw inspiration from.

Take a nap, do some meditation, and feel all the feelings — our present moment is so challenging right now. But after, get up and go. Fight for the future you dream of. We need you to.

Megan Cooper is a freshman political science and magazine news and digital journalism major. Her column appears bi-weekly. She can be reached at mpcooper@syr.edu.

Published on September 29, 2020 at 9:52 pm