I suppose when I was younger I never imagined that my first time voting wouldn’t be in a booth, but rather a few filled in circles on a white piece of paper. I also suppose when I was younger that things like Hurricane Katrina wouldn’t have any effect on us New Yorkers.

Well, I guess I was wrong for both.

There was an article on the front page of Sunday’s New York Times whose headline read: “Panicked Evacuations Mixed with Nonchalance in Hurricane Sandy’s Path.” In the article 27-year old New Yorker John Miller said: “Last time they made such a big hype out of it and nothing happened.”

In the days preceding Sandy’s arrival, even I was rather skeptic over the build up. Last August I sat in the basement of my house at 3 in the morning, having been told that a tornado was headed towards my town. Of course in the morning after Irene, there was much damage- fallen trees, flooding, but overall we were all back on our feet very quickly. This time around, based on the pictures I see, text messages I read, and reports over the phone I get from my parents, things are different.

The Long Beach boardwalk, a spot a mile from my house where I spent many of my summers, is now better suitable for making a bonfire than it is for walking on.  To know that my boat, which was once docked at a marina, is now probably shipwrecked on someone’s front lawn, or that there are live fish swimming in my grandparent’s basement- I thought to myself, “Those things only happen in New Orleans!”

I waited to see the shot of the headless Statue of Liberty- straight out of Cloverfield- this was a true disaster.

It is hard to imagine that only one of the articles on the front page of almost every issue of this week’s New York Times was about the election. October 30, one week until Election Day, the time with the most amount of election info, and only one small article having to do with the candidates?

Wait what election?

While all of this chaos takes place, on the political stage we still see both Obama and Romney “being presidential” but in actuality still “unofficially” campaigning for votes. In every journalism course I’ve ever taken, I’ve always been told to never insert your political opinion into a piece. Well, too bad. It makes me cringe when I read articles and hear on CNN that Obama may just win because of his “leadership” during Sandy. In last week’s Wheel, I predicted Obama’s “October Surprise” as his announcement for peace talks with Iran (by the way, whatever happened to those?!), but I never would have thought Ms. Sandra could have been the real “Obama Surprise,” not even Wolf Blitzer saw coming.

Yes, the election gets us all worked up, but at the same time it is so refreshing when we take a step back for a second. Wow, look at our political system at its finest… alright perhaps not at its finest, but compared to how every other country’s political process operates, we are definitely pretty lucky.

After checking my P.O. Box day after day (and as my friends know, never to find a single letter), on Wednesday I put my hand in, to finally pull out a long manila envelope that read “election material, please expedite.” Eighteen years on the waiting line, it was my time to vote.

“The right of citizens of the United States, who are eighteen years of age or older, to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of age.” – the Twenty-sixth Amendment to the US Constitution.

While I respect all of those non-voters, who for individual reasons, have decided they either cannot pick a candidate or do not want to chose any of the candidates, I still think that voting is an American freedom so precious that we cannot reject when offered to us.

Bahrain, Bhutan, Brunei, Fiji, Jordan, Kuwait, Liechtenstein, Monaco, Morocco, Myanmar, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Tonga, United Arab Emirates- a list of fifteen countries in the world whose citizens have no say over who runs their government.

As college students, it is crucial to remember that the biggest election issues most often directly effect our generation. Education, war, debt, healthcare, global warming, all issues that we are inevitably going to inherit, so why not make them ones that we won’t regret if we can make the difference? Because of such low voter turnout by the youth- often candidates traditionally overlook our age group when deciding whom to spend their advertising dollars on.  Even if you may think your vote “doesn’t count,” we simply cannot have a true working democracy if citizens both young and old aren’t active participants. If everyone thought their vote didn’t count, no one would ever vote!

There’s a common saying, “you’re not truly grateful for something until you don’t have it anymore.” Often when catastrophes like Sandy plague our homes, our families, our friends, or even random people miles away that we see on the news, we stop and take a step back to realize how fortunate we are and how grateful we should be for what we have. Just like in all hard times, those affected by Sandy will begin to rise up and rebuild both literally and figuratively.  New Yorkers have guts of steel and I have no doubt that they will be back on their feet very soon.

Perhaps as November 6, comes closer and closer by the day, we should all remember how lucky we are to be alive, to be healthy, to be American, and to be at Emory.

As I stamped my envelope and placed it in the mailbox I never felt prouder to live in the USA.

Brett Lichtenberg is a College freshman from Hewlett, N.Y.

Emory Wheel
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The Emory Wheel was founded in 1919 and is currently the only independent, student-run newspaper of Emory University. The Wheel publishes weekly on Wednesdays during the academic year, except during University holidays and scheduled publication intermissions.

The Wheel is financially and editorially independent from the University. All of its content is generated by the Wheel’s more than 100 student staff members and contributing writers, and its printing costs are covered by profits from self-generated advertising sales.