We’ve finally done it. We’re at a rare point of human evolution at this very moment in time. Mother Nature could pull out her iPhone and post a picture to her Twitter of the American populace making arbitrary decisions about elections based on the least amount of information possible.

You could argue that this kind of practice has been going on for years now, but I truly believe it’s at its peak right now. I’ve asked some of the people who attend our school their opinions about the race, seeing as it is supposedly slowly becoming cool to care about the election and all. The results can be rather laughable at times. Some favorite quotes from my peers are as follows:

• “Just as long as we don’t vote for Donald Trump, we’ll be fine.” Whether or not you agree with this statement is neither here nor there; it’s the reaction to this person’s justification for their opinion that we should all be able to agree on. “He’s just that bad.”
• “Isn’t there another Bush running? I guess if we’ve had two of them, they can’t be that bad.”
• “Do Ben Carson and Barack Obama believe in the same ideas?”

Some trends that should be noticed here are that A) all anybody seems to know about are Republican candidates – which we can infer is because there are over twenty of them– and B) nobody has any clue what they’re talking about. We shouldn’t be that surprised that people around our age are so ignorant about politics. The media has thrashed this generation for this a few times. I still can recall a 2010 report that made a huge deal out of the population being more aware of Android being the operating system on Google’s phones than who the new Speaker of the House would be. (Sorry, John Boehner. I know that might be too soon, seeing as you just resigned a few weeks ago.)

Why is it that teenagers care so little about the elections? In fact, why do most functioning human beings not care about the elections? Some people in the media will say it’s laziness, and that the people that are casting their votes are voting blindly. Let’s just put it this way: If that really were the case, the media sure is lucky that the public is continuously voting blindly for candidates who are mainly backed economically by the same corporations and organizations that back them.

To be honest, people have the right idea by not voting. The current bureaucratic system, as far as I’m concerned, should not be legitimized by general elections. As has proved quite a few times in our American history, it doesn’t matter what Americans have to say about their government. John Quincy Adams lost by 40,000 votes in the popular election, and still got elected over Old Hickory Jackson. Rutherford B. Hayes lost by 265,000 votes to Samuel Tilden; still became president. Benjamin Harrison lost by 95,000 votes and still got in over “Groover” Cleveland. George W. Bush is probably my favorite example, because he lost by over 500,000 votes to Al Gore, and yet he still got in. (Fun fact: 500,000 people is a little less than half of the entire metropolitan area of Trenton multiplied by two.)

Why should we even participate in our government when the people in power, regardless of party affiliation, serve nothing but the interests of the corporate backers who got them there? Our media paints this as an ongoing battle between the Republicans and the Democrats – but, my goodness, both of these parties are the problem. Portugal just held an election a few weeks ago, and they had eight political parties compete. Eight. Could you imagine eight political debates? The answer is no, you probably can’t. Imagine having to examine multiple points of view besides the moderate-right Republicans and the moderate-left Democrats. It’d probably be challenging.

Don’t worry – it’s not your fault. (Well, I mean, it kind of is. We allow this system to continue on year after year when we should really focus on revolutionizing our society and starting to take some accountability for our actions.) The American society has been organized in a vertical hierarchy. The government, the businesses, and the media are all interconnected.

Look at the recent slanderous campaign against Bernie Sanders by CNN. After the Democratic debates, CNN reported how Hillary Clinton was the “sweeping” winner of the debate. No way could anybody even fathom thinking about nominating anyone besides Hillary for the nomination. CNN held a poll on their own website that night, and 84% of the responders stated that Sanders won the debate. CNN’s reaction to this heresy by not only deleting the poll, but denying any and all allegations that it was ever held in the first place. Oops.

Why would CNN try to slander Bernie Sanders? The same reason they try and go after Donald Trump. You can like either of these candidates and come to the same conclusion here, in my book – The bourgeois don’t want candidates that aren’t inside their circle to enter the White House.

What do I mean by that? Donald Trump, for example, is self-funded. Trump is Trump’s biggest (and only) donor. Trump is not too concerned with doing much regulation and slamming on businesses, but he’s also not interested in letting the government bail them out or protect them. This is pretty bad for American companies that have gained access to monopolies through the government. I suppose Martin Shkreli wouldn’t be so happy if someone had to compete with him and he had to charge less than $750 per pill on a century-old medication that is sold for $1.50 per pill just over the border north of us.

Bernie Sanders is the worst case scenario for America’s greenback fondlers. All of this talk of free education, lifting tax exemptions on the rich, and ending trickle-down economics will simply not do in the White House. His biggest donors? Well, um, you see. He has no business donors, at all. He hasn’t even sponsored himself because Bernie Sanders’ occupation for the past fifty years has been campaigning for political office. This has been his life, and he’s just now seeing some success. He runs on grassroots donations. He’s the political equivalent of putting your loose change in one of those glass jars next to the cash register at Dunkin Donuts.

But let’s say somehow one of these two fledgling candidates makes it all the way to the White House. Somehow. Even then, it doesn’t matter, because America would have to elect people who will maintain their credo. That’s 450+ other elections that people need to study up on. This already doesn’t factor in the people that get elected who don’t live up to their word and are just corporate shrill – which, oh wait, is the overwhelming majority of them. The largest problem of all, however, is as follows.

The majority of laws that are written each year aren’t even written by people we vote for.

Let that sink in. You go through all the trouble of teaching yourself about the candidates, and studying up on political ideas, and you lobby hard enough for the candidates you want to get to Congress. You think you’ve finally made your change. All for reality to hit you and teach you the ultimate life lesson – in the current government system (and societal system as a whole), you have no say in anything.

It’s an all too disgusting trend that continues to happen. We allow it to happen in the workplace, as any teacher in our school could probably testify to when their curriculum is changed year after year with less and less time to teach it. We allow it to happen in our lives when we’re taught by the media how dangerously racist everyone is when in reality race relations are most dangerous between people of the same race. We allow it to happen every time we buy an iPod because we’re unaware of the other alternatives that are cheaper and actually made with the consumer in mind. We allow it to happen by having an economic system built on the exploitation of others – where the rich get richer and maintain their power in life, and the rest of us churn out their miracles for them. Every time you vote for one of these buffoons and allow the political system to continue, you send a message to the world that you’re complacent. You’ll do just fine living this way. You’re fine being a pawn for the political Magnus Carlsens and Bobby Fischers to move around on the geopolitical chess board.

Let’s just assume, for instance, that you’re not okay with this. One of the many solutions to this is to start opposing the voting system. There’s no need to sponsor this political system that serves to destroy our liberty and freedoms more and more every four years. The people should take back power into their own hands. We should be allowed to pursue our own dreams without being barred from it because we don’t fit the bourgeois’ definition of great. It’s time to reinvent meritocracy and be the writers of our own destiny.