It’s time our leaders listened to us for a change

Dawn Lassiter, a former student body president at North Lake who currently helps to oversee the SGA, said to me last week, “An effective government needs to be able to adequately communicate with our students, to ?keep our fi ngers on their pulse,' if you will. This is the only way we can be assured that we are aware of current issues, needs, and concerns that should be addressed.”

That strikes me as important as we near the midterm elections. Nationwide, candidates have been bombarding their constituents with messages. Commercials and stump speeches come at us from all directions, and they all have the same message: I am good, and my opponent is bad. Every day, another person is talking to us and each one is a little louder than the one before.

Maybe it's time our elected officials started listening to us for a change.

They should listen to us because the conversations that we are having are often very different than the conversations they are having with each other. Almost everyone I talk to about the war in Iraq, regardless of their view of the war's necessity, says that they are extremely worried about our ability to emerge from this conflict victorious. All you hear out of Washington, however, is either, “Things are going as planned. War is hard. Deal with it,” or, “The sky is falling.”

When I hear my leaders speak in terms that differ that drastically from my impression of reality I begin to sympathize with the people who just want to throw out the whole bunch of them and start from scratch.

For my entire life I've heard my elders decry the apathy of the younger generation. It's true that, on the whole, we don't engage in local, state or national politics in any tangible way, but can they blame us? We've been raised in a system in which we watched our parents get ignored by elected officials.

These officials, whose only job, it seemed, was to tell our parents how they should think and what they should believe, have behaved in such a way that it is no longer surprising when a congressman admits to propositioning minors, taking bribes or slowly stripping away our civil liberties. These days, it's simply expected.

Somewhere along the way, we all forgot that we elect these people to represent us. We elect them to deal with our current issues, to address our needs and to listen to our concerns. Politicians no longer have their fi ngers on the pulse because they've got them firmly planted in their ears.

An effective government needs to be able to adequately communicate with us. It's hard to communicate when only one side is doing the talking.

Luckily for us, it isn't too late for us to start talking back. On Nov. 7, the polls open and we get to do the one thing that they can't ignore. We get to vote.

— Dylan Biles is the editor of the News-Register.