LETTER TO A FUTURE VOTER

Attention all teens & tweens! YOU can participate in this election! AND have an impact that the adults won’t even see coming. After all, their votes are either going to save your future, or doom it.

Oct 20, 2024

To all my youngest followers and fans,

First of all, thank you for reading my Substack! And thanks so much for watching my movies and reading my books. I am so moved when you let me know how mad you are at my generation for handing you a world filled with so much war, hate and environmental destruction. It makes me wish I could wave a wand and just fix it right now. Harry Potter, sadly, I am not.

But what I love about your emails and comments to me is seeing how smart you are — and how you’ve already got us figured out.

As you know, there’s a big election coming up in the first week of November. I’m guessing many of you already know which candidate you like, and which one you don’t like. You yourselves will soon be voting. YOU will have an actual say. But you don’t have to wait until you’re 18 in order to have an impact. You can be involved in THIS election in its final two weeks. Right now, at 11 years old, or 14, or 17, you can act and make a difference. I even ran into an 8-year-old campaigner the other day. She reminded me that all 46 Presidents in our history have been men. “That’s not fair,” she said to me. She knows she may be living in a tsunami moment in history.

I am writing this letter to all of you from 8 to 17. The rules say you don’t get a say. I say, forget that — you already know how you can cause some good trouble. How do I know that? You’re 12! Here’s some ideas on what you can do to help get your candidate elected. Every little bit helps. Try any of these:

Talk to your friends! Talk about the Election! — Adults have hangups about talking politics and they like to avoid it — like the plague. But you've already lived through a plague! You don't care! Talking politics isn't going to kill you or put you in lockdown or make you do gym class on Zoom until you figure out you can just point the camera halfway toward the ceiling and occasionally stretch your hands into the frame to make the teacher think you're still engaged. No! Talking politics is fun. Changing minds is fun. Getting your friends to get their parents to admit they’re wrong is the most fun! The adults in your house may already be voting for Kamala Harris, but one really cool thing you can do is to get your friends to take your message home to their parents. Do they believe the MAJORITY POPULATION (women) should only have 29% of the power? Does that make sense? Shouldn’t all women and all people of color have a real voice in our government? Of course! Should you do all your homework from 1st grade thru 12th grade only so you can then graduate college with hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt? One thing I’ve learned about people your age is that you believe that things should be fair and that people should be treated fairly and that everybody should have an equal chance to succeed. Let me write a factual sentence here for you to read, realizing that some of you may be reading this true statement for the first time: “Just three families in the United States have more money and property than 150 million working and poor Americans combined.” (Source: PolitiFact) Whoa! Tell me what your first reaction is to that. Does that seem fair? Is that the country you would like America to be? Organize your friends and get them to talk to their parents about how their vote affects your future.

Ask Your Parents/Guardians/Older Siblings to Take You Along as They Go Door to Door Asking People to Vote in Your Neighborhood — Every four years, the Presidential Election rolls around and the yard decorations pop up all through your neighborhood and around your town and people put on scary clothes and hats and tell scary stories about aliens and outsiders who've come to kill everyone, shadowy figures and "bad hombres" from distant lands lurking in the dark who are about to... Oh wait, sorry. That's Halloween. Election season is a lot like Halloween. Think of it as "Electionween." One of the most important parts of both is going door to door and asking people if they would like a trick or a treat. In politics, a trick is when crazy people try to overthrow our elected government; a treat is universal healthcare. During Electionween, you can also knock on their doors! If you want, you can even wear a costume. You could dress up as a child in a cage separated from its parents. You could dress up as a zombie who was killed by our government's inadequate health care, lack of women's rights, unavailable dentistry, unaffordable housing, bad nutrition or gun violence. Or... you could just dress up as yourself: A 17-year-old who won't turn 18 until the day after the election. A 12-year-old who is angry that there may not be any whales left in the ocean by the time they are old enough to go see one. A 9-year-old who is wondering if, when she grows up, will she have the same rights as her brother?

Ask your parents, your guardians, your older siblings to take you door to door to talk to your neighbors about the future. Because it is your future. Not theirs. They've had their chance, and this is what it's gotten us. Remind them of that. Talk to them about what’s important to you for your future. Remember: This is your world. The rest of us are just living in it.

Not 18 Yet? Then Organize Your School — If you are in High School but you are not yet old enough to vote, please do not give up. Sixteen and Seventeen year olds actually have more power than most sixty and seventy year olds. How's that? Because the old ones are surrounded by set-in-their-way fossils who long ago decided to vote religiously or long ago gave up on the whole damn thing... while YOU are surrounded by newly minted 18-year-old seniors who have a magical power that they have never experienced: The Right To Vote. If you aren't yet old enough to do this legally, here's a very legal thing you can do: Organize your peers. Register these seniors to vote. Tell them who to vote for. Convince one of them to vote and then use that one to convince the rest of them to vote. Set up a table after school to inform them, hand out flyers in the parking lot after school, slip little notes into their lockers between classes. Do whatever you can to get the kids in your school who will be 18 by November 5th to use their new power. You know who they are. Go talk to them. Remember, every person you convince to vote, that is your vote! It’s known as: This is how you can legally vote five, ten, three dozen times! All you have to do is get these 18-year-old friends to exercise their right. Then you claim it as your victory. Done!

What's That, You're 8? — This letter is for you too! I'm sorry it doesn't have more pictures. Here are some pictures:

BAD!

GOOD!

VERY BAD! THE WORST! THE WORST EVER! NO ONE HAS EVER SEEN ANYTHING MORE WORST THAN THIS. EVERYONE IS SAYING IT.

THE LINE IS TOO SLOW. THERE ARE NOT ENOUGH PLACES TO VOTE. ESPECIALLY ON THE POOR SIDE OF TOWN. BUT LOOK HOW MANY PEOPLE STILL SHOWED UP TO VOTE! THIS IS VERY GOOD. BECAUSE NO MATTER HOW HARD THE BAD PEOPLE HAVE TRIED TO STOP THE GOOD PEOPLE FROM VOTING, THE GOOD PEOPLE JUST KEEP SHOWING UP AND WON’T GO HOME UNTIL THEY GET TO VOTE.

In closing, one good thing about a lot of adults is that they really like to listen to what kids have to say about the world they live in. Don’t be afraid to make your feelings known. Adults, most adults, want what’s best for you and want you to live a happy and fulfilling life. That can be done when our Democracy is strong, and everybody gets to participate. And I’ll leave you on this very cool and hopeful note:

In a number of countries around the world, they have decided that people under the age of 18 should have the right to vote, so they have lowered the legal voting age now to 16 years old. Why? Because they realized that many of the laws you will have to start following as an adult at 18 were made by the politicians elected in the last election when those 18-year-olds were 16. So they said, “You, at the age of 16, must have a say in the laws that you’re going to follow when you turn 18. Thus, you should be voters at 16.” Here are a few of the countries where the voting age is 16 years old:

Brazil • Austria • Scotland • Wales • Belgium • Germany • Argentina • Greece • Nicaragua • Ecuador • Malta • Cuba

And there are already a number of cities in the United States that have lowered the voting age for local elections to 16, including:

Silver Spring, MD • Berkeley, CA • Takoma Park, MD • Brattleboro, VT • Oakland, CA • Hyattsville, MD • Newark, NJ

(Learn more about the efforts to lower the voting age to 16 years old. Join with others to make this happen: Vote16USA.org + FairVote)

This is a movement that will only grow bigger. But you don’t have to wait.

Because we desperately need your help over the next two weeks. You will be able to say YOU helped make this happen. And for that, I admire you. And I thank you.

Photos by: Logan Cyrus/AFP, Angela Weiss/AFP via Getty Images, Richmond Free Press, Reuters/Mike Theiler, SOPA Images/Getty Images, Robert King/Getty Images

Michael Moore

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