Democracy is not a spectator sport

If you are a millennial who feels voting doesn't matter for whatever cynical reason, then consider that my mother, and likely your grandmother, did not have the legal right to vote in the United States before 1920. But this is but one consideration.

At this moment, we have a president and a party of enablers who are following the playbook that gave rise to fascism in Germany and Italy in the 1920s and 1930s. They are talking the talk and walking the walk. If you think this notion is far-fetched, take a day off and pay a visit to the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center or the U.S. Holocaust Museum. Attention must be paid.

More than ever, election outcomes are decided by the slimmest of margins and there is one party that believes in making voting - among certain groups - as difficult as possible in the name of voter fraud - a 0.0025 percent or less occurrence according to the Brennan Center for Justice. Paul Weyrich, the founding father of modern conservatism and conservative think tank groups like the Heritage Foundation said in 1980, "I don't want everybody to vote. As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down."

In 2015, the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act. Republican governors and their secretaries of state wasted no time pulling every shameless trick in the book to make it difficult for college students and minorities - including Native Americans - from casting a vote simply because they disproportionately vote Democratic.

One day sooner than you think, you might be fighting for your Medicare, Social Security, Health Care and Medicaid. Only one party is threatening to cut these programs after lavishing donors, corporations and the wealthiest in our society with a huge, unnecessary tax break that has exploded our deficit.

Millennials … do your grandmother proud. Vote. Democracy is not a spectator sport.

Mark Plotnick

Vernon Hills