The College Voter

In the year 2000, I did not recognize the consequences of things. I thought about getting my learners permit, about turning sixteen the next year. I thought about what I wanted to do with my hair color; about different ways to not fit in at school. Despite the fact that I still scribbled anarchy signs on my notebook covers, I was not really politically involved. I said nasty things about the government that I didn’t fully understand and I read about conspiracy theories. I thought to myself “You will stay like this forever,” and I thought that this could be a good thing, that I would remain some bohemian child in Florida, always saying stuff about the fucked up system. The year 2000 sounded like the future, so I never grasped that it was really happening. I just treated it like the preamble of something else, some other life I would soon get to live.

Respectively, I lost my virginity in a backyard, learning how to fold my body so it would fit through my bedroom window.

Of course I knew that it was an election year, that it was the new millenium. I also knew that my computer did not crash after Y2K and that the boys you sleep with in backyards would not always call you the next day. My father was for George W. Bush and my mother was not. My father said things about property taxes as his reasoning, later on he would say he considered himself a conservative. I got the boy who slept with me to become my boyfriend, and because of this, I thought I could do anything. I had some feeling that I wanted to change the world, but I also had the feeling that I would be sixteen forever, that not man or law could stop me.

My boyfriend’s mother, like my own, was a supporter of Al Gore. These were the years of mothers, we all adored our mothers and feared our fathers. My boyfriend’s grandmother hung a picture of George Bush and his wife Barbara on the kitchen fridge. She took me aside pulling my arm, and told me the greatness of that man’s qualities, and how they all would have rubbed off on his son. I remembered George Bush being president vaguely, I had a memory of watching Barbra Bush reading children’s novels to a kindergarten class, and because I was also in kindergarten, I ended up liking her very much. I did not understand that anything had real consequences, all of my feelings were about the next ten minutes, the next ten hours. I had no concept of the next two years - let alone four, or eight.

The day to vote came and suddenly the spotlight was on Florida. Everyone was upset for one reason or another, and everyone was paying attention. I was paying attention, but I also was thinking of getting my drivers license in a month and a half; about the girl my boyfriend sat next to in Algebra. When the results came in I was at a birthday dinner with my boyfriends family, a bunch of us left the table at The Macaroni Grill to stand next to a wide screen television. My boyfriend’s mother was near tears and a woman next to her said “He is just one man. How bad could it be?” And I had no idea, really about anything, I had no idea what any of this would mean.

And after that night, things changed. I started listening. I felt scared after September 11th, I wanted to donate blood like everyone else, but I was not eighteen yet. New York seemed far away, this place that only existed in books and on television, a place where I could never live. I felt sick and sad, like everyone else. I don’t know if I opposed the war because of something someone told me, or because of books that I had read, but I knew that I was against it. On March 20th of 2003, I watched the war begin on the television screen. All I remember is a black screen with green lights going off in the corners. I guess they were bombs, I guess I was watching CNN in my childhood bedroom. IMing friends online, I typed “is this really happening?”

In 2003, I left Florida. I blamed Florida for so much, I really blamed Florida for my whole life. Many of us did. I spent my freshman year at Kent State University, learning how to get drunk and cry in front of the May 4th Memorial. Instead of attending classes, I read in bed. I believed I was in a place that was polarized in 1970, that I cold still do whatever I wanted. When I was sent back to Florida in 2004, I campaigned hard. I heard so many people say “Anyone but Bush” and about how we had to pick the lesser of two evils, but I did not want to think like that. I just wanted something - anything really - to be different. And when my friends would tell me that they were going to vote for Bush, I would become irate, flinging my arms in the air in angst. “This is the first election that we can vote in!” I would yell, “What the hell is wrong with you?” I’d pick fights with any of them, no matter how long I knew them, or if they were making excuses about voting like their parents vote. When George Bush was re-elected, I was working in the Clearwater Public Library, I could see the ocean through the large glass windows. I fell to the ground, and in my most dramatic fashion, I wept. I cried on the floor next to stacks of books in a back room. The books were all damaged, they were going to be thrown out. They couldn’t even be donated, the library had no use for them. At the time, neither did I.

And I became defeated. My mother drank wine at night - my mother drank red wine every night. I could not blame Florida. I could not even really blame my peers. Instead, I blamed myself. I started connecting point A to point B and back again. I tried to make straight lines. I tried to limit how often I watched the news, I wanted a break. There I was 19, and ready to give up. Hurricane Katrina had happened, Bush had been elected, and then came the waves. I did not know if I should calmly wait for some apocalypse. I knew I had the right to vote, I had my drivers license, I had my theories about the government. I started planning for some life where I could make a difference, where I could help to change the world. I could not lose my virginity in a backyard again, nor could I recount any votes in Florida. I had no time machines, and I had nearly no answers. I hadn’t scribbled an anarchy sign in quite sometime and I stopped talking shit the way I used to. And then it was just like it kind of hit me one day, that things did not always have to be like this, that things did have consequences - that I could not only recognize them, but determine them also.

Daniela Scrima is a senior at NYU. She currently lives in Brooklyn. Read more of her writing on her personal blog, “Oh-Snap!”