“But you know, whoever is president isn’t going to affect your life. Nothing is actually going to change.”

My moderate parents have announced this to me during every election that I can remember. I was raised in one of Massachusetts’ few purple counties, a political outlier and a conundrum. While legislators 40 minutes away on Beacon Hill lobbied for free school lunch and codified reproductive rights, my classmates wore MAGA shirts to class and the principal informed me that the debate club could only continue to run if we didn’t discuss political issues. Tough luck for a political science major.

When I was younger, I believed my parents, and politics was a distant world of adults debating in fancy rooms. But with each passing election, ambivalence has become catastrophic. We no longer live in a country where neutrality is permissible. Politics is at your door and I don’t mean the millions of canvassers that mobilized in the past weeks. I mean real policy. No one is exempt from the effects of what goes on in Washington and state legislatures, for better or for worse. Tell a family crushed under mountains of medical debt that policy doesn’t change anything. Tell a hurricane victim without power or clean water that the government can’t help them, or a student who uses a textbook from 1997 in a crumbling school that there’s nothing to be done. An apathetic mindset will be our downfall.  

It’s okay to wallow about the election results, but not for too long. It has become clear that voting is no longer the ultimate civic act. We have to do more. Don’t let trivial things divide you. Think long and hard about the tangible changes you want to see in your country. As students who call ourselves the future of this country and pride themselves on being changemakers, we have to step out of our ideological bubble. The real world isn’t divided into neatly packaged ideological boxes and we shouldn’t be either. The number of Yalies who prefer to sit and debate each other rather than go out into their community and make their beliefs a reality has astounded me. We have a responsibility to act. 

We are in the midst of a civic literacy crisis. Even if voter turnout for the 2024 election stays the same as in 2020, that will still mean one-third of America did not cast their vote. While general indifference and decreased attention spans are partly to blame, what’s grown alongside them is a cultural taboo around discussion of the government, especially in schools. Just because something is political doesn’t mean you can’t talk about it, especially when everything is a result of politics. The sidewalks you walk on were built because politicians somewhere, at some time, passed an infrastructure law. There’s no more room to be neutral, but that’s not such a bad thing.

Politics is at your door, so open it. Go outside! Knock on doors. Call your representatives. Read a book — a full book. Go to a town meeting or city town hall. Run for local office. Because in the end, all politics is local. I’m willing to bet that the majority of issues discussed on national television are being reflected on local Facebook pages. As a student representative to the school board my senior year, many of our arguments to move our start time up from 7:05 a.m. were rooted in studies of Washington and California schools. No matter how far left or right a state leans, there is always work to be done and lessons to learn from them. 

I am not perfect. I definitely don’t spend as much time dedicated to causes that I care about as I want to. It is hard to stay involved in your town in a different state. But I’m not going to just sit and complain until the next election rolls around. Now is the time to get involved, and work harder than ever. 

So go! Go out into your community and use that Yale education to build something greater than yourself. Maybe I’ll see you at a Board of Alders meeting?

RILEY GETCHELL is a sophomore in Silliman College. She can be reached at riley.getchell@yale.edu