By Amanda Knox

I remember the first time I voted. It was 1996, I was nine-years-old, and it was over the phone, to participate in the Nickelodeon Kids Pick the President telethon. At the time, I was about as political as I was religious, which is to say, vaguely aware and uninvested. All the same, I was excited to vote, because it was the first time in my life that I had the chance to implement my (albeit immature and uninformed) opinion about the greater world around me. No matter that my vote didn’t yet count. For the first time I thought, one day it would.

Fast forward another nine years and I think I forgot to take part in my local elections when I turned eighteen. Attending freshman University classes, working a part time job, getting to know my new relationships and freedoms as a young adult, and in general feeling relatively comfortable and privileged took up all my emotional and mental processing, energy, time. I was also flummoxed and frustrated with the political environment—it was 2005, we were still at war, and the various stretched, flexed and mutated reasons for that war didn’t feel like they belonged to or had anything to do with me. I had voted against it, to no avail. My vote had never felt so insignificant.

Having missed out on the millennial turnout in 2008 that brought Obama to office, the only time in my voting-age life that I’ve felt excitement, solidarity, and self-expression through the act of voting was in support of the right to same-sex marriage in Washington state. Otherwise, I’ve not gone out of my way to fill out my ballet every time it arrived in the mail.

Because of this, some might consider me stereotypically millennial. Politically apathetic. If I’m not voting, I must not care. I must be enamored of Russell Brand’s rhetoric. Kids these days.

Surely the distillation of this stereotype rings shallow, but there it is, and here is my defense.

As a millennial, I have opted out of voting because all too often I have not felt represented by my political options. At the front line of a more expansive, interconnected society, I have felt more represented by direct participation and consumption of media, culture, and interpersonal dialogue. Which is to say, in a time where everyone is a journalist, an advocate, a politician, I have more faith in my own ability to directly represent my interests and concerns, instead of entrusting self-undermining, bipartisan politicians and institutions.

The unfortunate consequence of such opting-out is that millennials and millennial perspective are evermore under-represented by those politicians and institutions which implement policy and nevertheless represent us. Whether we like it or not, they shape of our shared world and the course of our shared history.

Enter 2015. I happened to turn down invitations of friends to gather in pubs to drink and be entertained by the same old “sh*t show” of the Presidential primary debates. As usual, I did not go out of my way to listen to the soundbites and only faintly heard the echoes of headlines.

Rather, it was the memes that stopped me in my tracks:

Wounded veterans waving to a crowd during a parade, and the caption, “This is why I don’t care if we torture terrorists.”

A faceless, camo-draped soldier with a rifle slung over his shoulder, and the caption, “God gave his archangels weapons because even the Almighty knew you don’t fight evil with tolerance and understanding.”

A pit of snakes juxtaposed to an image of a crowd of refugees waiting to cross a border into asylum, and the caption, “Can you tell which snakes will bite and which will not?”

An American flag wrapped around a white cross, and the caption, “One nation, under God, not Allah.”

Calls to deny the fact of climate change. To criminalize immigration. To abolish public health care. To enforce Christian religious morality on the rights of a secular state. To refuse entry of Muslim refugees into the United States. To implement a mandatory death penalty policy. To carpet bomb the Middle East.

Whoa.

But what made the hair on the back of my neck stand up was that these sentiments were not just being expressed by isolated, ignorant, hateful, extremist trolls who made the memes, but they were being echoed, in one form or another, by actual Presidential candidates.  

Either this was an ingenious ploy to shock people into political participation, or this was the dangerous consequence of opting out for too long.

Either way, I’m informing myself, and I’m going to vote. Not because I’m excited. Because we are better than this. I invite my fellow millennials to do the same.