Please vote. I can understand how politics is stressful for people, but voting really is important.

The author of the recent opinion “Don’t vote” does seem to care about the right issues. Government waste is bad. However, they really could have picked a better example — $600,000 is a drop in the bucket for a budget measured in the trillions. 

Even if you stop voting, you’re not opting out of taxes — that is a crime. So, if you really want your money to be used effectively, you need to vote. 

As an alternative to voting, the author advocated private charity, portraying helping at a homeless shelter as being more effective than politically campaigning for change and voting. Government is the means by which society can marshal its resources to solve its greatest problems. 

Sure, you as an individual can and should do impactful work triaging the deep wounds in our society by helping shelters, donating to food banks and supporting, through your own personal time and resources, a whole host of other worthy causes. 

But to actually fix things like, say, homelessness, we must redirect our collective effort through government to make sure everyone is housed, fed and given medical care and restructure our society so that there is no risk of homelessness.

The government programs of the Great Society and the New Deal dramatically improved Americans’ security and quality of life beyond the charities which predated them, and we can do more. Systemic problems cannot be fixed by individuals. Government is how we must fix them, and voting is how we get the government to fix them.

I know when voting it can seem like you are one voice in millions and that your vote doesn’t really matter. 

The reality is that while there are millions of us, your vote still matters; in our system, it simply takes millions of us to push on an issue at the ballot box for it to be fixed. It is your duty — if you want to fix those problems — to be one of the millions who care and who vote.

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