Everything Wrong with Today's Youth

Jim Crow still exist! The new “voter ID laws” popping up all over the United States affecting rural and urban communities are solid proof of that fact. It is unfair and one would think illegal to require such boundaries for citizens who wish to vote in this country. Clearly no one will raise a fuss about it until Obama losses though. These new laws don’t prevent fraud, and they aren’t proper national security measures either. They are deliberate and focused on stopping minorities and poor people from carrying out their civic responsibility.

1 in 10 Americans who are eligible to vote won’t be able to because of these requirements which are just as serious as poll taxes. Obviously, what our leaders think they are stopping is illegal immigrants from stealing the election, but in reality they are halting the American process of voting for hundreds of thousands of people who already don’t vote.

So, now along with the excuses of “my vote doesn’t count” and “the power is in the electoral college” we can now add that “I don’t have a drivers license” to the list.

The Real Issue is:

While working in Atlanta, GA last year I worked on a few different projects to try and get homeless men and women their basic ID’s. Since we live in an age of fear I understood how important ID’s were for everything. People who don’t have ID’s are literally nothing.They have no proof of existence, legally, which is dangerous not only because they can “commit crimes” and “still others identities” (Things the “right” want you to be fearful of) but also its dangerous because the person without an ID is vulnerable to legal and illegal penalty’s, too.

My biggest surprise while taking on this challenge was noticing that not all faceless people were homeless. Some of these people had families, and were looking for jobs and were unable to get jobs or any sort of income because of lack of identification. Some were young (my age) and weren’t able to get a job or get into school because they lacked ID’s. The real catch is that, in order to get an ID you must have documents that are either:

1. too expense for many people to get new copies of
2. impossible to get copies of in a timely fashion

So, its fair to say that voting is the least of these peoples concerns. Most had great disdain for voting and government at all levels, which I now sort of share because of this discovery.

So in conclusion, I understand everyone’s angst with this in relation to voting, but there lots of people who are affected by this in everyday life. And that needs to change.

Cover Photo © 2012 Virginia Guard Public Affairs. Taken from their Flickr.