Written By: Harrison Moss

A presidential election is a composition. Every four years, the people of the United States of America come together to play their part in writing a song. It is a song that we will all sing for the next four years, no matter how well it fits our throats, lips, and tongues.

I say “the people,” but I lie. The song is composed by a committee of the willing and the able. It is composed of those who have the right to vote and choose to exercise it. In 2024, one hundred and fifty-eight million people composed a song. I was not one of them, but I will sing nonetheless.

I am seventeen. I do not have the right to vote. Not for a few months to come.

I am not alone. There are many of us, seventeen or sixteen or younger still, who are going to be subject to the consequences of a choice we had no say in the making of. 

It’s tough. Eighteen is an arbitrary number. It would still be arbitrary if it was seventeen or fourteen or twenty, but it stings to be off by so little, to know I was born just a little too late.

It might not have changed anything if we could have voted, all we who are near-adults in the eyes of the law. After all, it’s not as if all my fellow youth are unhappy about the result of the election. 

Along all lines except for age, high school students are just as diverse a group as any in America, and we don’t all agree. I think, though, that most of us who feel strongly about the election, about the state of our nation, wish we could have voted. Whether we wish we could have sailed forth with the might of the raging tide, or whether we wish we could have paddled furiously against it, or whether we wish we could have done something else entirely, it’s tough for us that we didn’t get to.

We all have a couple of things in common. We were seventeen by the start of 2024. We didn’t get to vote because we were born just a little too late. We have good words in our minds and on our tongues and at the tips of our fingers, and we want them to be heard and read and considered. We’d appreciate it if you’d take some time to see what we have to say.