Let’s just say, for argument’s sake, we care whether the Republicans are going to take the Senate, if third-party candidates have a shot, how effective the EPA is going to be (if the Republicans take the Senate, they are going to stop the EPA from regulating coal-fired power plants), DC’s marijuana legalization, personhood laws, and/or the effectiveness of the 2016 Presidential elections. But ask us millennials to order a mail-in ballot from our home state, go to the voting polls, or actually register? We won’t do it. 

As Grace Wyler writes in a Vice article, “If you are like virtually everyone else in America, you give zero fucks” about the midterm elections. And as millennials (according to Wikipedia, people ages 18-33), we’re the people in America who give the least number of fucks. 

According to Pew, in 2008, 61 percent of people ages 18-29 were registered to vote. Now, it’s 50 percent. If you’re 65 or older? 87 percent chance you’re registered. 

It’s not like we are unaware of our surroundings. If anything, as the first generation to pretty much grow up in an era of technology, we are connected with more people and have seen a surge of user-generated content within the media. We’re not just watching the news, but making it. And with this, technology has changed the degrees of separation (the number of connections between you and any other person on the planet) from 6 to 4.72, according to the New York Times. 

Yet, those of younger age brackets also have had the historically lowest voter turnout. The United States Census Bureau’s voting report found that in the presidential elections of 2000, 2004, 2008, and 2012, voters ages 18-29 had voter turnouts of 40 percent, 49 percent, 51 percent, and 45 percent, respectively. For people ages 30 and over, those numbers were 65 percent, 68 percent, 67 percent, and 66 percent. These are the presidential elections. But for midterm elections in 2010? 24 percent of people ages 18-29 and 51 percent of people 30 and older voted. 

Is it that we simply don’t care? No—we have plenty of opinions. According to Pew, with regard to same-sex marriage, interracial marriage, and marijuana legalization, we’re much more liberal than our parents (51 percent of millennials support gay rights compared to 33 percent of the baby boomers). And we’ve seen our views translated into laws. And it’s too simple to say that we are misinformed or we were just too lazy to order the mail-in ballot.

There has to be something more—and it’s political disenchantment. 

As folks who grew up in the age of technology, the War on Terror, Occupy Wall Street, the Great Recession, we’ve come to distrust the government. But it’s not just the government—it’s everything: the “man,” the media, our parents. According to Gallup, in 2013, 40 percent of Americans trust the media, compared to 60 percent who say “not very much/not at all.” This wasn’t the case before 2006. 

The Vice article had it wrong—it’s not just that people give zero fucks, it’s that millennials have become, to a certain extent, disillusioned. We watched the War on Terror unfold and accomplish little to nothing; we’ve heard presidential and campaign promises amount to smoke; and we’ve seen little regulation post-recession on big businesses and banks. 

So, are we, our disillusioned selves, going to turn out for this vote? I’m calling it now: we’re not. Put simply, our disillusionment has gotten the better of ourselves (in a sense, debilitating us) to such a point where *50 percent of us aren’t even registered.* And only half of those are going to voted last midterm elections. 

Put simply: we are under the impression that our voices don’t count, and because of that, we refuse to speak.