Who to vote for is not the only question on young people’s minds in this election. The other is whether to vote at all.

To say both major candidates – Hillary Clinton for the Democrats and Donald Trump for the Republicans – do not satisfy one’s standards, and so will not receive one’s vote, is an apparently reasonable idea.

Yet when the time of reckoning comes, and the candidate who wins starts to deliver (or not deliver, which is the more likely option) on their promises, that same person who withheld his or her vote should not then complain. To do so is like to a starving man refusing crackers because they are not his favorite food, and then to complain he is starving.  

Each candidate has their faults. Each candidate will also likely not do anything to change “the system,” against which so many young people who don’t vote think they are rebelling.

But we are here – we are at this point in the election cycle – the “system” is operating full-force, whether one likes it or not. And when the question comes two years later, after today’s candidate-become-president has tossed the world into craziness and confusion (as each party tends to think the other will), how will the person who did not vote justify that action?

To refuse to choose between two inevitable evils, as this election is often deemed, is not an adequate excuse for allowing the greater evil to win. Perhaps the “system” itself can be changed through other, more persuasive and influential means than voting. Think of writing letters to newspapers, working on campaigns, talking to elected officials, petitioning, speaking at government meetings, or by any other means being an outspoken voice in the community. It might even be changed when this younger generation begins naturally to take leadership of the country, and reform along with it.

But voting is what we have in the meantime; and to have it is a privilege, to use it is a duty.

That said, it is clear who is the lesser of two evils in this election: Hillary Clinton.  

It is painfully repetitive to write about Trump’s faults. He is a disgrace to the traditions of the Founders and an abomination to the nobleness that could be American politics. Not only does he prey on ignorance and fear – he encourages them. He has the temper of a spoiled child, the honesty of a pathological liar, the respect and decency of a caveman, and what I would only imagine to be the bigotry of a mid-19th-century Southern plantation owner.

Why so many people continue to support him is a sad mystery, and one which reflects the lowest light on their characters. But that is beside the point.

For all of Clinton’s faults, the choice of whom to vote for is as clear as – day? no – as clear as Trump’s ineptness itself.