Last summer, my whole family gathered for a sendoff party before I went to college. I sat in a lawn chair, sipped my punch and numbly nodded my way through a thousand questions about what I was going to do with my life. Each interrogation about my plans for the future was punctuated by enthusiastic proclamations about how wonderful my next four years would be.

     Your glory days, they said. A time to just have fun, they said. I wish I could go back, almost all of them said, I never worried back then.

They did an excellent job of hyping up the whole experience, but as I opened my graduation cards that night and realized that I was going to have to put almost all of the money I received towards my tuition, I wondered just how carefree and blissful my next four years were going to be.

Look, I’ve had lots of fun in college so far, and I’m excited for what the next few years bring. But I would be lying through my teeth if I told you I wasn’t terrified about the future. The truth is, it’s very, very hard to be young these days. And there are a lot of reasons for that.

But let’s start with the most obvious one: If all of those well-wishers are correct, if this really is “the beginning of my life,” then I’m coming out of the gate bogged down by tens of thousands of dollars in debt. If I want to establish myself as a competitive candidate for meaningful employment, I’ll need to rack up double that debt for a master’s degree program. To do that, I’ll need to get a job in the interim to start chipping away at not only those debts, but also the regular, day-to-day expenses that everyone has to deal with.

So this summer, that’s what I did. I got not only one job, but two jobs, both on campus to minimize transportation costs. Both of my jobs paid Michigan’s minimum wage–$8.50 an hour. Not ideal, but the best I can do without a degree. I worked my ass off, full time, at minimum wage. I breathed in paint fumes at a maintenance job all day, every day and then pumped my body full of unhealthy amounts of caffeine and walked a mile in the dark (alone, armed with nothing but pepper spray) to work an overnight shift after that. Still I was unable to pay for gas, food, and rent–and compared to my friends, my rent was cheap. Now consider the fact that, during the school year, the time I can work is cut in half. Consider the fact that the current cost of a single credit hour (not a single semester, not a single class…a single credit hour of one class, mind you) is $452 and rising. Even if the rate held at $452, it would take me a full month’s salary to pay off that one credit hour. I haven’t calculated what it would take me to pay off all the credit hours necessary to earn my degree, because that would be overwhelmingly depressing.

My current economic situation is exactly the type of problem plaguing millions of people today. Global capitalism has shunted the flow of wealth towards the already-rich with such stunning effectiveness that 62 people are now as rich as half of the world’s population combined. Meanwhile, the poor only get poorer, and in industrialized nations such as the United States, the middle class–once the sign of a thriving national economy–is shrinking. For women and people of color, wealth gaps are even harder to close, and they’re only widening. Everything is becoming less and less affordable for more and more people, from the cost of college to the cost of housing to the cost of cars. The economic future of this country and this world has been dropped into the bloody hands of an elite few, and they would do anything to gain more money and more power. What a time to be entering the job market!

But that’s not the only reason why it is so terrifying to be young these days. Even scarier than drowning in an ocean of debt is drowning in the actual ocean, and with each passing day it looks more and more like I’ll meet my end in a watery grave. Every month for the past fourteen months has been the hottest month in recorded history. And besides giving my poor pale boyfriend a horrible sunburn, there are massive consequences to that. Right now, Louisiana is being washed away by floods of biblical proportions. The parts of California not ablaze in wildfire are shriveling in drought. A village in Alaska has voted to uproot their lives and move because the ground beneath them is literally melting away. And that’s just in the United States. In poor countries, the effects of climate change are even more severe. Recently, the capital of Macedonia was obliterated by floods that killed dozens of people. Climate change has exacerbated wars in the Horn of Africa. I could go on and on and on, but I think you get the picture, and hopefully you agree that it looks pretty apocalyptic.

Although I suppose that if climate change doesn’t bring about the armageddon, war will. If only we could just stop fighting, or at least chill out and not buy $1.8 trillion worth of killing machines that the army doesn’t even need, but neither of those seem like options for the future thanks to our disastrous foreign policy consensus. The financial cost is massive, but the human cost is even greater. 461,000 Iraqi civilians and nearly 5,000 US soldiers have been killed for absolutely no reason. Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have destabilized the globe, causing terrorism to flourish. Every single day, terrorists conduct operations that kill innocent civilians across the globe, from France to Pakistan to Mali to Russia to Orlando, Florida. I have to strip down to my socks to get on a plane and every time I turn on the news another city has become a place that I’m supposed to pray for.

And if I’m not hearing about how I need to pray for a city afflicted by terrorism, I’m seeing the names of black men reduced to hashtags by a racist cop’s bullets. I’m watching in horror as my country’s institutional elites rig elections in their own favor. I haven’t even touched on the millions of families that have been ripped apart by deportations and our broken immigration system. Nor have I mentioned the fact that the NSA is spying on US citizens, the fact that the US routinely kills civilians in drone strikes overseas, the litany of problems plaguing our justice system, the epidemic of rape on college campuses, the issues destroying our school system, the fact that segregation is still a major problem in our cities, or the fact that there is an active effort to suppress voting rights unfolding across the country.

It is impossible to rid our world of its problems, but it is nothing short of irresponsible–no, frankly, suicidal–to suggest that we should face the staggering list of challenges threatening our country by reinforcing the same old policies that got us into this mess in the first place. A vote for Hillary Clinton is a vote for the status quo. It is a vote in favor of the Iraq War and countless useless, hawkish wars after that. It is a vote against raising the minimum wage to a living wage, a vote in favor of money in politics and the rigging of elections. Hillary Clinton and her husband spearheaded many of the crime bills that have led to the irreversibly damaging mass incarceration system which has destroyed millions of black lives and black communities; she dehumanized poor black and brown youths by referring to them as “superpredators“.  Hillary’s main donors are the financial elites that brought about the collapse of 2008 that tanked the global economy; she has no plan to prevent these people from playing fast and loose with your money in the future. She claims that she will help students like me by making tuition free, but why should I believe a woman who has lied so many times before? Hillary Clinton’s foreign policy facilitates right wing coups against democratically-elected governments, throwing countries into chaos and leaving the rest of the world to deal with those dangerous reverberations.

The United States–and the world–will soon reach the breaking point on a number of serious issues. We will have to decide whether or not we are brave enough to overhaul the broken system we currently have, or if we desire the easy-in-the-short-term solution of sticking with what we know. For me, the answer is easy. I know that the world needs to change. I’ve lived the struggle of an unequal society and I can’t, with a clear conscience, do anything that would support the continuation of such oppression and inequality. So when it came time for me to cast my ballot, I voted for the man who was brave enough to vote with the future in mind. The man who held Vermont’s first pride parade, decades before LGBTQ issues were socially acceptable to even discuss in public. The man who has fought consistently for workers’ rights and against the anti-labor trade deals that have cost millions of people their jobs. The man who proudly stood against the Iraq War even as his Senate colleagues were duped by lies, fear, and the promises of wealth and power. The man who has consistently stood with the best interests of the public even in the face of the immense wealth, manipulation, and power of the world’s elite. I voted for the man who boldly fought the status quo for his entire life. I voted for Bernie Sanders. And I will never stop fighting for his political revolution. Because the world can’t wait any longer.

Signed,

Eloise Mitchell

Check out Eloise’s Blog: https://shutupeloiseblog.wordpress.com