Why do politics matter and why should I bother?

Greetings subjects of Danialistan! It is with great pleasure that I announce the completion of my 58th thought! For this most recent PLP exploration in humanity, we discussed politics; why don’t young people care, and how do we get them to? Personally, I am really fascinated by politics and it is something I spend a lot of my time outside of class learning about. But before we could get into the modern day discourse, we had to first understand how do humans organize themselves?

We began this project by reading William Golding’s classic novel “Lord of the Flies,” a tale of survival, structure, betrayal, insanity, and ultimately, humanity. The purpose of our reading was to understand human nature and how human’s tend to organize themselves. We were meant to analyze the characters, environment, themes, events, and symbols in the book and compare and contrast them to things we see in our lives, 70 years after the book was written. After we finished reading the book, we held a series of socratic seminars to discuss what we found that could answer our essential questions. To read my written analysis, click here, but be warned, it does contain spoilers.

At the same time we started reading Lord of the Flies, we also began to learn about how our modern social systems were created. We learned about Social Contract Theory, and the philosophers who thought of these structures. We learned about 3 main philosophers and their theories; Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. I found it very interesting how these 3 theories are so unique from each other, but since the 1700s, almost every government in the world is running off one of these ideas. If you are interested in reading the notes I took on them, click here.

After we finished reading the book, we started to learn how the Canadian government works. I thought this would be very important to our final product because I feel like a lot of young people don’t understand how the government works. We began by watching a clip from the Rick Mercer Report on the structure of Canadian government. As a politic enthusiast, I already knew about most of the topics discussed in the video, but it was still interesting to learn about the state of Canada during the time the video was made. After a few more lessons on the federal government, we did many and many Kahoot quizzes on it. Thanks to my severely overblown knowledge on Canadian government, I got first place every time and got every question right. After a few weeks, we did a final quiz that would count for our grade, and I can confidently say that was the easiest quiz I have ever done.

By now, we all had a proficient understanding of government and it was time to begin working on our final product; we would form groups and deliver a presentation to a group of PLP students on why you should care about politics and the importance of voting. Along with the oral presentation, we would also create a video explaining how the government works. Along with me on this journey was Max R, Nolan, and Cale. The first step was to make the video. We knew this would be a bit challenging to make a video about government entertaining, but we had a good idea. For most of the video, Max would be standing in front of a green screen, talking about different aspects of the government, while related graphics would appear behind him. I played a dictator character who would interject with comments about how terrible democracy is.

I took a lot of inspiration from the 2012 comedy film ‘The Dictator,’ one of my favourite movies of all time.

Once we finished the video, we began to work on the main part of our presentation. We began researching some key political issues to include in our video. We analyzed cost of living, environment, and healthcare issues, and began to craft arguments on why these are important to young people. Then, we began to plan for our presentation, and Nolan came up with a really good but unconventional idea; we would do a satirical presentation on why you should NOT care about politics, and we would talk about terrible things that could happen if you don’t vote. The point is to satirically explain what could happen if you don’t vote. It was a bit tough to write the script, but we managed to create a really engaging but also informative presentation.

Our presentation day started off a bit shaky because Nolan was sick and couldn’t come to school, but luckily, we got Declan to fill in for him. We presented in front of a group of PLP 10 and 12 students, and the presentation lasted about 10 minutes. During the presentation, I was a bit nervous because everyone was pretty quiet during the funny parts, but the feedback they gave to us afterwards said they really enjoyed it. We didn’t get any video of the presentation, so I will just have to include my favourite quotes:

“You may have heard all your life to vote, but with my very unbiased dictatorial opinion, I disagree.”

“By not voting, you are telling the government you don’t want anything done about these pressing issues… this is a great way to maximize your suffering!”

“There are many influential political organizations in Canada… It is very important that you do NOT support any of them… No matter how convincing or logical their ideas are, remember that it’s a brainwashing technique created by the underground lizard illuminati matrix that runs the government”

“One thing you should never do as a Canadian citizen is to expect the actions of your leaders to have consequences. Never let them be held accountable.”

“Make sure you are as uneducated as possible about each candidate.”

In all seriousness, political engagement among youth is a serious issue. If we keep letting previous generations govern the young without our voices being heard, we risk being stuck in time, unable to adapt to new changes. I think the best ways to tackle this problem are to encourage young candidates, register to vote, get influencers to encourage young people to vote, and let your voice be heard in regards to issues that matter to you.

A Message from the Government of the People’s Free Independent Democratic Federal Republic of Danialistan.