The uncertainty and unpredictability of the impending presidential election made this year's New Hampshire primary more important than usual. For the vast majority of Dartmouth students, casting our first primary ballot made our trips to the polls even more significant and memorable.
Furthermore, Tuesday marked the only time most of us will have the privilege of participating in the first-in-the-nation New Hampshire primary at all. We will most likely never again get to witness Bill Clinton interrupting our dinner to shake hands, Larry David standing around in our living room to crack jokes and answer questions about Barack Obama, or see Obama himself speaking to us before breakfast --all just to get our vote.
All of this hoopla, however, amounts to the pageantry and highly orchestrated politicking that revolves around getting young voters to the polls. We, and young voters across the country, are sold the idea that our vote matters by campaigners who are simply doing their job: trying to get their candidate elected. There is a fine line between wanting us to vote, and wanting our vote.
In one sense, our participation on Tuesday was the first quantifiable sign that we are now American adults. When we have grown older, though, voting will no doubt seem less like a privilege and more like a way to diffuse the pressures of our adult lives by making someone pay attention to our issues --or maybe our voting patterns will evolve into jaded disaffectedness. Either way, we will be lucky to have had the opportunity to appreciate the onus of voting as young students in an important election.
For this opportunity, we should direct our thanks to the many campus activists and leaders who made sure we got to the polls and stayed informed on which candidate matched our values best.We should also thank our local and state government for making the voting process hassle-free by welcoming Dartmouth students as state residents.
On Tuesday night, America waited for late-reporting Grafton County to announce its numbers. For once we were not the only ones focusing on life in Hanover and for probably the last time, we let ourselves think that the whole country was waiting to hear from us.
