It’s your right to vote…use it
I was born in the Philippines and moved to the US when I was five years old. Because we moved around so much due to my step-father being in the Navy, my mother had to keep re-petitioning to become a US Citizen. By the time we settled in one place long enough for her to become a Naturalized Citizen, I was already 18 and had to petition on my own.
I was in college now and believed in finding my true roots as a FIlipino-American. Maybe you could say I had anarchist tendencies at this point when I was searching for truth. I was studying different religions, forms of government, the Illuminati and the lies our public school systems taught us. At 18, I had no desire to become an American Citizen because I felt the US had done so much wrong in the past. I didn’t believe in our government. I didn’t believe even if I could vote, that it would count for anything. So why bother? As an activist, I felt I could do just as much good fighting for the causes I believed in and spreading truth where I could.
Jump to Sept. 11, 2001. I got a phone call waking me up hours before I needed to get up for work and I was not happy. I was living in Los Angeles at the time and the voice on the other end of the phone just kept yelling at me to turn on my TV, to any channel. And there it was. Black smoke coming from the Twin Towers in New York. And then, the first Tower fell. My heart sank and I was fearful of the world I was living in. I cried uncontrollably because I had no idea what was going to happen. I felt truly helpless and afraid for the first time in my adult life.
As with many, that day changed my life in so many ways. Too many ways to write about here. But I will tell you that in the weeks after the attacks, I became a real American. I thought about all the other countries in this world and I couldn’t think of one that I would have wanted to live in or grow up in. There wasn’t another place where I could have become the person I am or had the opportunities I’ve had. There wasn’t another country where I could speak loudly against injustice as my right.
So I decided it was time I became a citizen and let my voice be heard in the greatest sense. I wanted to vote. I read about real women’s suffrage, civil rights and all the things people went through in this country to have the right to vote. There’s more to it than what they teach you in school and I took a long road to this realization.
But I did it. I Became a US Citizen in 2003. I proudly and emotionally cast my vote for John Kerry hoping against all hope that my vote would matter and we could change this country around. Unfortunately, darker clouds and old-boy networks prevailed. We lost that election. Or rather, it was stolen from us. But I have not been deterred from my duties.
This year, I will cast my vote for Barack Obama and hope again that our individual votes add up to enough electoral votes to win the country back from the Rebublicans. This year, I will again believe that this country belongs to the people who make it run every day and to those who own the factory. Because if it wasn’t for the little people running the machines, that factory wouldn’t have anything to show.