Salvation or annihilating?
Be or not to be is almost like vote or not to vote. Elections are very important in our society and can change many things. Do young people know about it or they just pretend they do not?
It is 2018, it passed 25 years from the establishment of the European Union. Many things have changed, many things have appeared. The European Union gives us many choices like travelling, studying abroad or even living abroad without complications comparing to the times before the EU. There are approximately 500 million citizens in the EU and the question is if they really know what is the purpose of the European Union. It is extremely important to know a culture, history and politics relation of the environment we live in. Youth consider things that happen around us, no matter if it is positive or negative, for granted and they do not think about the impact at our society.
In our society, we meet with the election, depending on who we vote for, not every day but it does not mean that it is not important. Either it is voting for president, for the government or it is an election on a local level with mayors. All types of elections are very contributive for each of us even though, sometimes, we think our vote does not matter. No, your vote matters a lot. Voting and standing for election are very similar, neither people do vote nor they stand for election.
We listen to quotes like “Why should I stand for election?”, “I can not change anything”, “There are many other candidates who can change the society” almost always before elections. At first sight, they are pretty simple and considerably ordinary but after concentrated thinking, their message is deeper and sadder than we can imagine. There are answers to these quotes: “If not you, who else?”, “Yes, you can change something!”, “There are many candidates but one of them is YOU.”.
Young people still think they have enough time and they prefer to give their time to other activities that are not related to politics. Comparing to the past, priorities, in general, have changed a lot not depending on the country. More options, more advantages, more freedom and not being enough mature to do life-decisions are reasons for not standing for elections. Question is how to change it, how to break the fear and support them to find the right plan to change the society by standing for election. There are several ways of supporting them and giving them the right arguments to show them that it makes sense but it is not very effective if they do it just because of our persuasion. Firstly, they have to believe in it. Many dilemmas like what would be changed or how I could profit from it confuses them because young people do not want to do something without the rewards. Let´s think about the patchy in the education system, health care, finance and security in our society. All mentioned above struggle a lot in our countries, all of them need to be improved to work in an effective way. These are the reason why they should stand for elections and at the same time they are as well as benefits. It is only important to show them the right way and encourage them correctly. In the upshot, our society is us, what we do, how we behave, who we meet with. All of these are only little steps for us but for society is very important because only by small steps we can do big steps; therefore, young people should not be afraid of anything and they should show the power of young soul and enthusiasm for the change.
Written by Radka Malinčáková from Slovaquia
