Like many people across the nation, and frankly around the world, on Election Day evening and into Wednesday I have been glued to my phone, willing an outcome to manifest. But regardless of what the inevitable outcome of the 2020 Presidential election is, I am unable to shake one thought in particular: I’m elated that my home state of 21 years has finally been elevated to the national political conversation.

Georgia’s role in the presidential race was not so much a dramatic set of twists and turns, but a battle of wills. It has been a battle of endurance, to see whether Trump could hold his lead or Biden could inch his way past the margin. Predicted to be a toss-up to begin with, the race led with pollsters warning in the few weeks leading up to Tuesday that either party could take the state’s sixteen electoral votes. At the time this was written, Biden closed a two-point gap on Tuesday to be within striking distance with a 0.8% margin, or only 39,000 votes. Even late into Wednesday night, media sources asserted that Georgia still remained in play with 200,000 outstanding votes. These facts taken together are astonishing, since Democrats have not won here in nearly three decades.

I remember listening to election coverage around the time Biden was chosen as the Democratic nominee, and being disheartened that Georgia was not being taken seriously as a potential swing state. Pundits have not seen the metro-Atlanta area like many of its residents have always being taken seriously as a potential swing state.

Pundits have not seen the metro-Atlanta area like many of its residents have always seen it, which is a very diverse, increasingly young electorate.

Only very recently have mentions of the Dekalb Farmer’s Market and other symbols of changing demographics in the state surfaced in the mainstream media.

Stacey Abrams, largely credited with turning out droves of new voters with her organization Fair Fight, has known about our state’s potential since her near-victory in 2018.

And she has clearly had a large influence on the state of the race in the Peach State, where she managed to convince the Biden campaign to increase spending there in the last days leading up to Nov. 3.

No one else in the state has had a bigger impact on championing Georgia as a serious contender, and she did it while starting and leading her own national voting rights organization to fight voter suppression on both fronts.

I don’t believe that Georgia should be limited to the two narratives that emerged pre-election: that it is the same Republican stronghold that has existed for decades, or that its changing demographics have somehow made it a very viable Democratic state.

From the initial results, it is clear that Georgians are split down the middle, and most consider themselves political moderates.

Down-ballot races largely reflect a similar range of voter opinions, from the election of a QAnon supporter to the House to four progressive Democratic DA’s picking up GOP-held seats.

I think Georgia is actually incredibly representative of the national race, in that razor-thin margins separate a deeply divided country that comprises mostly moderates.

It seems to signal that America is not electorally ready for the kind of sweeping changes that progressives were hoping for.

What gives me optimism is Georgia’s future prospects. If not this election, there will come a time when the state becomes unrecognizable from the state it was ten years ago.

This kind of exceedingly thin margin was unthinkable to both campaigns just six months ago.

This is a margin that conservatives never saw coming and we can only wait to see how it plays out.

If Georgia does indeed end up flipping, it will be the first time in 28 years since it happen.

Young people, college students, and people of color are increasingly exercising their collective political power, and the thought of what could be is intoxicating.

So as we wait for Georgia’s results to come in, and as the gap narrows by fractions of percentage points by the hour, I don’t see the race as a nail-biter. I see it as victory.

I can clearly remember the day that I got accepted to Tech. It was a cold January morning, and I was distracting myself from my anxiety by helping to wrap up Christmas ornaments. A little bit after noon, when the decisions were going to be released, I forced myself to sit down at my computer at the kitchen table and open the admissions portal. I’m generally someone who likes to rip the band aid off; getting through the pain faster is easier than stewing in anxiety most of the time. I logged in and opened the page. As soon as I saw the “Congratulations!” banner across the top of the page, I sprang up from my chair and ran in circles around the house, screaming at the top of my lungs. I’d got in!

There was nothing that I’d wanted more since I’d moved to Georgia several years before. From the moment I heard about Tech, I knew that I wanted to come here. Getting accepted made me feel unstoppable. There was nothing that I couldn’t do; life would just be a cakewalk from here on out. I couldn’t have been more wrong.

As we all know, Tech is one of the hardest places to simply exist. I have been pushed way past what I thought my breaking point was many times at this school. Tech has gotten me to do things that I never thought possible. Even now, in my last semester, Tech is reminding me of how ruthless it can be and how it rarely eases up on its students. It’s really easy to think, in the midst of all the adversity that we face here, that the admissions staff got it wrong. I know that this thought crossed my mind many times over the past 5 and a half years. I can remember one such moment: I’d turned in a perfect homework assignment in CS 1332. Every single test case passed. My design was elegant and efficient. And yet, because I forgot to include an extra file I’d added, my code wouldn’t compile and I got a zero on the assignment.

When I realized that there was nothing I could do, that no matter how much I tried I could not undo this error that would cause so much damage to my already tenuous grade in that class, I sat down on some steps outside Klaus and cried. What is it about this school that can cause us so much grief and pain?

If you’d asked me then, I would have confidently said that I didn’t get my validation from my grades. And yet that failure rocked my world in a way that belied that confidence. I think that for many of us, Tech is our first real experience with failure that we are helpless to fix. There was nothing I could have done in that moment to fix the broken code I’d turned in.

There was truly nothing I could have done to fix the situation. Whether I liked it or not, I’d built an image of myself over the years as someone smart, successful, and talented.

The situation did not align with this self image, and so I felt a deep sense of loss and sadness. In my despair, there was only one conclusion to draw: I did not belong at Tech.

I didn’t think that I would ever get to where I am now. And yet here I am, four weeks from my last final ever. It seems surreal, almost fictional. As I arrive at the finish line, there’s only one conclusion to draw: I was wrong.

As I sat on those concrete steps, certain that I’d destroyed my education, certain that everyone who believed in me would be disappointed, certain that I didn’t belong — I was wrong. I have been tremendously blessed to have people around me who reminded me that I was wrong in that moment. My friends, my family, my girlfriend, professors, my campus minister have all managed to remind me again and again that I was wrong.

Tech has been a crazy, confusing whirlwind, but I wouldn’t trade it for anything. All of the pain and hardship is punctuated by so many wonderful moments and memories that I’ll take with me the rest of my life. And all the pain and hardship has made it possible for me to overcome even greater hardships as the years have gone by.

So if you’re sitting on those steps outside Klaus feeling like the world is ending: go ahead and cry. It’s a good spot to cry on campus; hardly anyone uses that door, and it’s covered from the rest of the turnaround by some big plants. But once you’ve cried, get up and get going. You’re a helluva engineer, and you belong here.

My first boss used to say that admissions is like putting together a puzzle. You look at the pieces, figure out how they fit together, carefully assemble them, take about two days to appreciate your work, and then move on.

The longer I’ve been in this field, however, the more I’ve come to appreciate it’s really you who moves on faster. Once you receive the letter starting with, “Congratulations! You’ve been admitted to the Georgia Institute of Technology,” you stop worrying about your college admission experience, and start thinking about your actual college experience.

Sure, after that you may skim a few emails from me asking to send your final transcripts, register for FASET, or keep up your grades, but understandably your focus shifts to connecting with other new students, figuring out where you are going to live, speaking with advisors, and plugging into campus.

Most years I’m okay with that. Most years I’ve done my job by getting you here and it’s time for the next puzzle.

This year, however, I’ve realized that analogy is deeply flawed.

It is true that each year our admission team has the privilege of creating the next class of Yellow Jackets. It is true we work diligently to select each unique student and marvel at how you ultimately come together. However, the puzzle image is static and does not account for the fact that we never stop appreciating your growth — individually and collectively.

I’ve also realized that while most years I’m ok with the last word you hear from me being, “Congratulations!” this year is different. This year, as we all know, is not most years. This year is all the things… unprecedented, challenging, and the list goes on.

This year, I still have something else to say… Thank You!

Thank you for choosing to be at Tech in such an uncertain time. Whether you are a returning student or a first-year, you could have stayed home. You could have gone elsewhere for financial, health, distance, or other reasons.
Thank you for being all the things we saw in your application- resilient, committed, passionate, and caring. The Georgia Tech community is better because you are part of it.

Thank you for giving us grace as we are figure out how to teach, advise, counsel, deliver courses, and build community in the middle of a pandemic.

I realize that when most of you think about our motto of “Progress and Service” you are more motivated and focused on the first word. Thank you for leaning into “Service” this year.

Thank you for caring for one another and encouraging each other. From the notes hanging from the Tech Green trees to the painted pumpkin patch to the stories of meal deliveries and birthday celebrations, as well as all the infinite unseen messages and efforts you are constantly making to lift up your friends, roommates, classmates and teammates, THANK YOU!

Congratulations! You are the Georgia Institute of Technology. And no analogy could ever capture the beauty, power, and privilege it is to be part of it with you.

Thank YOU! And Go Jackets!

When I was first admitted to Georgia Tech, I was thrilled but knew it would be a culturally different experience than from Georgia State, where I transferred from. I was going from a predominantly Black university to one that was predominately white. This switch felt like walking into an alternate Jordan Peele tinged reality. I had no idea what my new social life would look like and if I would even have one here.

The first rude awakening I had in regards to what my Tech experience would look like was going to Wreck camp. I was the only Black camper out of about 150 and there were maybe two Black camp counselors in attendance. Luckily, one of them happened to be my counselor. She and I had an unspoken awkwardness at first for obvious reasons. The lack of diversity was never spoken about during my time at camp and I felt ashamed that I was glad it wasn’t. My experience at Wreck camp helped breakdown most of the anxiety I had about racial tension when starting at Tech. We did exercises where we stood up if we agreed with a certain statement. Statements like “Stand up if you feel like you don’t belong at Tech” or “Stand up if you think you were admitted by accident” resonated with me and I promised myself I would be honest, so I stood up. Then, something amazing happened, I saw that there was a large percentage of individuals across different races to stand up for both of these questions. Although I was alone in my complexion, in that moment I felt like I was among friends.

The camaraderie I witnessed lingered within me for a while, but at the end of my first week of classes, I felt more disconnected from campus than ever. I realized that the ‘brother/sisterhood’ experience was superficial and no more than indoctrination with no real depth to it. I was sold a lie. A fantasy. A delusion.

How was I supposed to feel at home in a place that disproportionately doesn’t let people that look like me in? The Black student population at Georgia State was roughly 42% while at Tech the Black students only make up a whopping 7% at a little over 1,100 students. Atlanta is the second largest majority Black metropolitan in the country with 34% of the nearly 2 million citizens in the city identifying as Black. Georgia Tech is literally sitting in the middle of a Black mecca and not even one out of ten students are Black. It is disgraceful. There is a major flaw in the admissions system that needs to be dealt with. Black students should not be overlooked as scholars and only equated to how fast they can run or their arm span. When you think of Black students at Tech, it should be foregone conclusion that you first think of Black student-athletes. It reiterates the misconception that the only way Black students could have gotten into Tech is through their physicality and athleticism.

This week Georgia Tech Athletic Association has revealed its “diversity, equity and inclusion pledge” in order to better support Tech athletes in their strides to make social change. This pledge will become an integral part of the “Gold Code” which all Tech athletes must abide by. This is a step in the right direction, but it is coming from the wrong people. It is all well and good that the athletics department wants to stand up to discrimination and racism within itself, but Tech needs to think bigger picture.

Our institution has the power to overcome the systemic discrimination within our own admissions processes. We need to ask ourselves what the obstacles are for Black applicants or potential Black applicants of Tech.

By expanding our outreach to a wider array of schools and not just at the predominantly white suburban high schools. More recruitment efforts should be made at schools that are in urban areas that are physically closer to Tech as well. Many Black high school students end up not applying to Tech at all because it may seem too out of reach either academically or financially.

Last week, Staff Diversity, Inclusion, and Engagement held its third annual “Transformative Narratives,” a virtual “storytelling crawl.”

The series comprised six story-related events, and included performances from Milbre Burch, Sonny Kelly, and Lani Peterson, all celebrated and nationally touring storytellers.

The stories expressed under told personal experiences with gender, race, identity and more.

The Technique sat in on “‘The Talk’ One-Man Performance, Talk-Back & Story Swap,” event in which Dr. Sonny Kelly spoke aloud his play about sensitive discussions that “we must have with our children as we prepare them to survive and thrive in a racialized America.”

This one-man show artfully portrays the talk Kelly gives his son about growing up Black in the U.S. Kelly plays over 20 characters and brings in literature from Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, W. E. B. Dubois and others. The performance finishes with a literal talk directed at the audience — Kelly emphasizes that this conversation is for everyone.

This last piece of the play, held over BlueJeans and attended by participants from all over the globe, focused on shared experiences and new perspectives gained from Kelly’s play.

The idea of creating unity rather than further dividing his audience, or as he says, “calling everyone in, and not out,” is important to Kelly. He creates community through performance. “All of our stories can be shared in ways that challenge us, that make us uncomfortable,” said Kelly.

Everyone in attendance was organized into breakout rooms, where we discussed our reactions to the play. Audience members expressed the puzzle of identity that “The Talk” expressed.

Phyllis Unterschuetz, fellow storyteller and author of Longing: Stories of Racial Healing elaborated that “for Black boys, their own understanding of their identity has been created by other people. Because of systemic racism, they’ve been robbed of their ability to create their own identity.”

Rebecca Burnett, another audience member, shared her appreciation for the craft of storytelling that Kelly pulled off.

“I’m interested in concepts that are extremely hard to understand put into words that are accessible to people not in the speaker’s shoes,” said Burnett.

Among the topics of conversation was the efficacy of different media to tell a compelling story.

Speaking from the perspective of an author, Unterschuetz said that “there is something about theater that breaks resistance to learning and to hearing.”

A lively performance is key to a great story, but so is vulnerability.

“You have to tell personal stories to get things across. Otherwise, readers close up,” said Unterschuetz. She went on to say that “narrative is an astoundingly powerful tool. I’m interested in extending the venues of narrative beyond storytelling.”

The breakout group discussed the reaches of storytelling, with one member reflecting that the politics of storytelling speak to people who “already have strong beliefs about community & humanity.”

Back in the main room, Kelly shared his advice on the craft of creating a story. “You’ve got to let the story breathe — the story has its own spirit.”

He spoke about the particular place of Black men in this country. “Things haven’t changed much over time about the way we treat Black men in America,” said Kelly.

Pearl Alexander shared that she almost sees “different versions” of her America. “Being a Black parent at these times is hard. Trying to be strong and brave in these circumstances [is hard],” said Alexander.

Kelly spoke on the different expectations for Black children, telling about his painful experience explaining to his son the hurdles he’d have to face.

While a white boy banging on a vending machine would likely be seen as well-intentioned mischief, when his son did this, Kelly lost his temper and disciplined his son rather harshly. He explained that “a Black boy could have “been interpreted as vandalizing the vending machine for banging on it.”

This difficult place Black parents in the U.S. hold is a shared experience between many audience members — some said they felt apologetic for doling out seemingly harsh discipline on their children, but felt they were forced to to protect them from racial injustice.

In fact, the difficult conversations that families have with their children are not limited to Black parents. Kelly pointed out the necessity of white parents and grandparents being involved with the lives of their Black children and grandchildren.

“They have the same obligation as Black family members to share their kid’s life and speak on it.”

Kelly places a large emphasis on invitation in his work. He believes that storytelling can teach even those who seem closed off to conversation.

“Ignorance, when presented with humility and grace, should be answered,” said Kelly.

Lani Peterson remarked that the event had been a “powerful experience… on so many levels; race, white privilege, motherhood, power of storytelling to connect, deepen and begin to understand something from the inside out.”

Recordings of each storytelling event going back to 2017 can be found on the Staff Diversity, Inclusion, and Engagement website.

Be a little OCD. The title belonged to a section on the front page cover of a magazine I had glanced over while waiting in my doctor’s office a few weeks ago.

The section was centered around ways to keep your home “clean & tidy” and how to keep small things organized around the house. As someone medically diagnosed with OCD, I just had to laugh at the outrageous title.

No wonder people don’t take mental illness seriously, I remembered thinking. Apparently it’s more of an advantage than an illness.

I’ve always had a feeling I was OCD, and that I suffered from anxiety but I was always afraid to talk to my doctors about how I was feeling.

Society seems to portray mental illness as a condition that isn’t serious and that those who are affected by it are simply weaker than everyone else.

I was too ashamed to admit I needed help. A few months ago, I was at an all time low. The pandemic brought my anxiety levels through the roof and the little rituals and things I used to do to calm myself were no longer enough.

I needed help and finally admitted that. I was referenced to a psychiatrist by my doctor and was then diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder and OCD and put on medication to help what I could no longer control.

Being OCD is not simply being tidy and organized, it is not an asset to my everyday life. It is a condition I have to overcome every day to function just like everyone else.

It is not something worthy of romanticizing. It does not belong on the front cover of magazines as something worthy of praise. Yes my friends tease me about being a “clean freak” but that isn’t even from my OCD.

My OCD causes me to be late to an online exam because the pencil holder on my desk is at a weird angle and I can’t quite get it right. I fixate on it until it is satisfactory and then realize I’m 5 minutes late. My OCD causes me to turn around and walk another way to the same building because I feel like I “did it wrong” and something is off even though it will make me late to the meeting I am supposed to attend. It is an illness I deal with everyday, not a trait I should flaunt and romanticize.

By claiming you have OCD because you are organized and tidy, you diminish those who actually suffer from the condition. You praise something someone is suffering from. The same goes for any mental illness. It is one thing to get help and a professional diagnosis if you feel you are truly suffering.

It is another to joke about being “a little OCD” or to claim you are depressed simply because you are sad for a few days. This trivializes mental illness, and dismisses those who are truly suffering from such conditions.

Stop romanticizing mental illness, stop praising it on the front cover of magazines. Instead, help your friends who suffer from such illnesses like depression, anxiety, and OCD. Having any of these mental illnesses are not hip or cool. It does not make you seem quirky or more fun because you claim you have mental illness as a joke.

On the other hand, if someone seems like they genuinely identify with a mental illness, do not just write them off.

Check on your friends and check on yourself as well. Go get professional help and get a real diagnosis before self-diagnosing and diminishing the effects of mental illness on those who actually suffer from it.

Having a mental illness is not something to be ashamed of, I am not saying it is something we should hide and be embarrassed about.

I am saying the romanticization needs to stop. Instead of writing articles on cleanliness and titling it Be a little OCD, write articles on people with OCD and their experiences with working around their mental illness and overcoming it.

So, next time you decide to refer to yourself as “a little OCD” and you actually are not, keep all this in mind.

Having OCD is not a game to me. It is my life. It is something that I cannot change about myself, so for someone to throw around the term like it’s nothing is really insulting.

We are not victims of mental illness, we are survivors. We are people who overcome more than the average person each day.

We praise cancer survivors, not cancer itself. So why do we do this with mental illness? Praise those who work hard in spite of their illnesses rather than the illnesses themselves.

In this year’s election, I will be endorsing Reverend Raphael Warnock for U.S senate. Warnock is running to fill the seat republican, Johnny Isakson, left two years into his six year term. Warnock is going head to head for this seat against republicans Kelly Loeffler and Doug Collins.

Warnock is a liberal politician that will fight for Georgians and stand up against the addition of more right-wing policies in the state.

Growing up in a household with 11 brothers and sisters in a housing project, Warnock was forced to grow up faster than most. He made a name for himself in Atlanta from a young age and was heavily involved in his church.

He would go on to become a pastor at the same church, Ebenezer Baptist Church, where Martin Luther King Jr. was also a pastor. Warnock’s deep cultural connection to Atlanta and Georgia is one reason why I know he will put citizen’s best interest ahead of his own.

Warnock was not born with a silvers spoon in his mouth and will leave no citizens behind just because of their class status.

Warnock supports the notion that scientific findings should always outweigh any financial gain for himself. He is not a career politician that has chosen to put profit over people like his competitors.

More specifically, he wants to put more emphasis on mitigating climate change effects in Georgia’s underprivileged communities. He will better invest in infrastructure and make sure that in Georgia’s move to more sustainable practices, citizens will not suffer in the process.

More specifically, Warnock points out the upgrade in infrastructure needed in parts of his hometown, Savannah. This part of Georgia is extremely susceptible to extreme weather and will continue to be one of the most effected areas in Georgia as the climate crisis continues.

On the topic of healthcare, Warnock believes in fighting for affordable healthcare for all. He also wants to expand access to reproductive and mental health services.

Warnock has been endorsed by Planned Parenthood and NARAL Pro Choice America. Another huge reason I am endorsing him is his advocating for women to have the right to choose what they do with their bodies.

Warnock will fight for LGBTQ+ rights with emphasis on providing proper medical care and housing for this community.

Because a large percent of homelessness in Georgia are those that belong to the LGBTQ+, he sees great significance in providing gender inclusive housing and providing aid for LGBTQ+ youth. This is a huge issue across the state of Georgia that does not get the attention it deserves.

Rev. Raphael Warnock will move Georgia in the right direction and will best benefit the future of the state as a whole. He is a trojan horse for change and is extremely needed in this time in history.

When finding his name on the ballot it is going to be almost all the way at the bottom.

Because this counts as a jungle primary, where any party candidate can run for the position, the list is quite long. Finding his name is absolutely worth it though.

For all these reasons, Warnock is the best candidate for this U.S. senate seat. Although Warnock currently has a slight lead in Georgia, it is important to still get out and vote come election day Nov. 3.

Also, keep in mind that if no candidate gets a majority of the vote then there will be a runoff election.

This means that you must come back to the polls and vote again. Runoff elections are notoriously forgotten about.

Anonymous

In this upcoming election, many of my voting decisions have come down to the candidate’s position on climate change. And the climate policies of Republican Senator David Perdue and Democratic candidate Jon Ossoff could not be more different.

In 2017, Perdue was one of 22 Senators who sent a letter to President Trump stating “we strongly encourage you to make a clean break from the Paris Agreement” and encouraging him to continue working toward his “commitment to rescind the Clean Power Plan.”

On the other hand, Ossoff’s campaign website reads “I’ll push for America to immediately re-enter the Paris Climate Accord — and then to lead negotiation of an even more ambitious climate treaty.”

It also states, “I’ll work to reverse the Trump Administration’s rollbacks of clean air, clean water, and fuel economy standards — and then to strengthen them.”

In a year, when fires in California have reached a new record of 4 million acres, the Atlantic hurricane season has been called “hyperactive” with 25 named storms. Recently, summer temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere were considered to be the warmest summer on record.

Basically, it is hard to deny the threat of the changing climate. In the past, there were significant advancements in climate change policy including the Paris Climate Agreement which was signed in 2015 by nearly every nation to commit to keeping the global temperature rise under 2 degrees Celsius this century.

In a similarly historic manner, the Clean Power Plan was announced by former President Obama and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in 2015 to reduce carbon emissions from power plants.

It set the first-ever national standards that addressed carbon pollution from power plants. However, current politicians, such as Senator Perdue, have turned their backs on these significant advancements, regressing society to ignore our current problems and force us to inevitably face harsher consequences in the future.

Many scientists have stated we are running out of time to fix our climate before we reach tipping points and runaway effects threaten life as we know it.

Although, Ossoff will have the biggest impact only within the state of Georgia, sustainable practices have to start somewhere. I believe he will make good on his promises and is the best candidate from an environmental standpoint.

Honestly, I’m scared for our future environment if politicians like Senator Perdue are elected again which is why I endorse Jon Ossoff for Senate.

I consistently see evidence that the younger generations are not confident enough in the voting process in this country. Recently, I listened to an episode of the popular podcast Radiolab. In this episode, the Radiolab crew explores what could happen in the months after the presidential election if there isn’t a clear victor. Through the explanations of scenarios involving social media disinformation and faithless electors, one of the people they interviewed said something that really stuck with me. “Democracy is mostly a habit”, she said, and I realized that she was completely right. So much of our democratic process is based on our habits, on what we did last time. We simply cannot hang our freedoms on something as tenuous as habit. We need to push for voting reform that will eliminate the ambiguities in the American democratic process. One place to start is to remove the current system of two political parties and an electoral college and replace it with direct Ranked Choice Voting.

Ranked Choice Voting sounds complicated, but it actually is intuitive to most of us. We rarely have only a single opinion on a topic. Generally, we have a favorite, then a second favorite, and so on, whether we’re talking about ice cream flavors or sports teams. Ranked Choice Voting taps into this in order to make voting more equitable.

When you vote in a Ranked Choice election, you select not just one candidate, but several. Voters rank candidates, indicating their first preference, second preference, and so on. The votes are then counted. If there is a clear winner based only on first preferences, then that candidate wins.

If, however, there is no clear winner after counting all the first preferences, the candidate with the fewest first preference votes is eliminated from the race. The votes that indicated the eliminated candidate as first preference are then given to whoever is indicated as the second preference. This continues until there is a winner. In Ranked Choice Voting, your vote can actually live on way past when your top choice is no longer able to win.

Why would this change be good for America? Firstly, it would help us reduce the polarization that we see in our country today. Ranked Choice Voting makes it possible for multiple parties to exist and actually share power. Expanding the number of parties that can actually get elected will give the American voter more choices.

It will be easier for a voter to find a candidate that lines up with their values, and that candidate will not be hindered from getting elected by the system. A coalition government could incentivize politicians towards long-term thinking instead of just looking at the next election cycle to try to gain a majority.

The issues that politics deals with are almost never binary. Why should our political process be binary? Voting reform would also improve motivation to vote. So many people don’t vote because they believe that their vote won’t make a difference. Many others refuse to vote because their values simply don’t align with either major political party. Ranked Choice Voting allows for better expression of the nuances of people’s values, and allows for votes to have an impact even if your top pick didn’t make it. Instead of forcing voters to put all their eggs into one basket, it allows them to more accurately express their opinion.

If people feel that their vote can actually make a difference and that it can accurately represent their positions, they will be more likely to vote.

Our founding fathers predicted that partisan divides would be one of the biggest challenges facing this nation.

Grouping all of the varied ideas and cultures that America holds into two warring parties has given us nothing but gridlock and reduced confidence in our democracy, just as the founding fathers predicted.

While parties may be inevitable, there must be a way forward out of the morass of partisanship that we’re in now.

Embracing change and establishing a better, fairer, more engaging voting system is that way forward.

Like many people, Donald Trump’s election to high office four years ago set me on a path of political redemption, penance for previously having been so apolitical. I wanted to be more engaged, not only on the volunteering front, but also in starting productive conversations about politics with my family members and close friends. Specifically, I wanted to understand why members of the East Asian and Asian communities were so disengaged from the political process, and why the Asian American population is so often excluded from national discourse.

According to Pew Research, Asian Americans are the fastest growing segment of eligible voters in the United States, but rarely are we elevated to center stage as an ethnic group. The Center for American Progress estimates that Asian Americans will constitute nearly ten percent of eligible voters by 2036.

Yet, there has consistently been a ten percentage point voter turnout gap between Asian Americans and their white counterparts for decades. Why is this? Evidence has pointed to barriers stemming from a lack of civics education, outreach, and in-language materials and translators, as well as an overall pattern of voter suppression for people of color.

The American Bar Association and others have also pointed to a reluctance of major party politics, candidates, and media to take Asian American civic engagement seriously. Take Andrew Yang for instance, who despite raising $16.5 million in Q4 of 2019, was misidentified as ‘John Yang’ on MSNBC and largely ignored by broadcast media during his presidential bid.

It is also a fatal error to collect voter data on Asian Americans as a group, given the fact that no common language or political affiliation unites the majority of its members. The grouping of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (AAPIs) often seems arbitrary to people like me, as if it is too inconvenient for the government and media to collect disaggregated data on an incredibly diverse ethnic and racial group in the U.S.

The erroneous assumption that Asian American groups are interchangeable was apparent in many of the probing comments I received growing up: “No, where are you really from?” and my personal favorite, “Do you speak Asian?”

But after four years of political noise, what is clear to me is that Asian Americans are becoming increasingly energized as they recognize the demographic shifts that are making them a forceful voting bloc, from the national level all the way down-ballot.

Kamala Harris is predicted to significantly increase Indian American voter turnout come November. Sri Kulkarni, a Texas Democrat running for a House seat, is leading a successful campaign that has held phone banks in 13 languages in order to reach non-traditional Asian American voters who have simply never been engaged with.

In Georgia, Dr. Michelle Au is running to serve as its first Asian American state senator in SD-48. The fact that a Chinese-American woman is running for a state Senate seat, in Georgia no less, is a testament to how the political landscape has changed alongside a much more diverse electorate.

Even among my family members and family friends, there is a palpable desire to get out the vote and to intentionally have uncomfortable conversations about our ‘model minority’ status and historic complacency in elections.

The president’s inflammatory remarks about the ‘China virus’ and its downstream effects on racial violence against Asian Americans have prompted many of our communities to examine our own roles in perpetuating racism and our solidarity with BLM.

I believe that no matter the result of the election next week, this is only the beginning. With a growing population and fervent enthusiasm for democracy, the only possible path for AAPI political participation is forward.

2020 marks the 75th anniversary of the end of World Word II and the start of the Cold War, a conflict that shaped former United States Senator Sam Nunn’s time while serving in Congress, as well as his work afterwards with the Nuclear Threat Initiative.

On Oct. 14, Nunn discussed how nuclear weapons still pose a threat to the world today in a talk with the Georgia Historical Society.

Nunn, who was born in Macon, Georgia, attended Tech, Emory University and Emory Law School. He then served in the U.S. Coast Guard and Georgia House of Representatives before being elected in 1972 to the U.S. Senate.

One of his earliest experiences with the intersection of foreign policy and nuclear war was the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962, during which he was attending a NATO Conference with the Armed Services Committee in Europe.

“We were actually briefed by the Air Force with photographs and all the classified information, sort of every step of the way once the Cuban Missile Crisis broke out,” said Nunn. “… We were at Wiesbaden Air Force Base, which was sort of the head of the U.S. Air Force Europe, on the night where it really looked like we were going to war.”

That night, Nunn sat next to the top Air Force General in Europe during dinner.

“He had a whole big computer back [with] him with all sorts of communication equipment,” said Nunn. “During the course of the dinner, he told me that he had about 20 to 30 seconds, once he got the signal, to basically turn loose his aircraft to go after the Soviet Union, because we thought we were going to war.”

This experience shaped his view of nuclear war.

“That brought home a sense of reality to me about the dangers of nuclear war that had an effect on the rest of my life,” said Nunn. “… It brought home to me two things: how close we came to war and how much subjective judgment was involved in the [John F.] Kennedy decisions and the [Nikita] Khrushchev decisions to avoid war and second, how little warning time we had.”

Nunn points out that during the 1960s, leaders had more decision time because planes flew much slower.

“Having very little decision time in a moment of great crisis is extremely dangerous for the world and that’s, to me, one of the prime goals we should have today, which is to give both U.S. and Russian leaders more time so that we do not move into a nuclear war by blunder,” said Nunn.

New technology adds additional danger.

“When you introduce cyber and possible interference in command and control and warning systems, I still very much worry about compressed decision time,” said Nunn.

“And if I had my way today, and I’ve told President Obama this, I’ve told President Trump this and I’ve told President Putin this, that if I had my way, the leaders would call in their military and say ‘Look, we have a mutual existential interest to give each other more warning time.’”

He emphasizes that it is to everyone’s benefit this technology works correctly.

“The chances … of a nuclear war by accident miscalculation are much greater than the chances of a deliberate premeditated attack,” said Nunn.
Besides the Cuban Missile Crisis, Nunn reflects on an inspection trip in 1974 to the U.S. Tactical Nuclear Weapons Base in Germany.

“It was highly sensitive in terms of security,” said Nunn. “… The top generals will tell you, ‘Everything’s fine, we got security.’ As we were walking around a sergeant handed me a crumbled note and said, in effect, ‘Senator, this is all B.S., if you’ll join my buddies and me in the barracks, we’ll tell you what’s really going on.’”

The sergeant revealed to Nunn the true state of the base, such as malfunctioning electronic fences, no guard dogs patrolling the perimeter and frequent alcohol and narcotics use among the guards.

Nunn was so alarmed by what he heard, he immediately returned to the U.S. and met with Secretary of Defense Jim Schlesinger to discuss how to better protect these weapons.

“You also need to listen to the sergeants and the enlisted people out there who are on the front line, because they can tell you what’s really going on and they will be usually pretty darn frank about telling you what the problems are,” said Nunn.

Besides Nunn’s work internationally, his time in the Senate included the Watergate Scandal. The question of giving one person the sole power to launch powerful weapons was central to his thought process.

“Do you want one person as the sole authority to be able to launch a nuclear war and destroy God’s universe?”

“Do you really want one person to make that decision?” said Nunn.

“My answer after a long number of years is no, but to move beyond sole authority and to continue to have the kind of deterrence you need is a very tricky proposition and would require the Congress to organize itself in a very different way than it is organized today because somebody’s got to be able to make a rapid decision.”

Currently there are nine nuclear powers: the U.S., Russia, France, United Kingdom, China, India, Pakistan, North Korea and Israel.

“After the Soviet Union broke up, three countries gave up all their nuclear weapons, because Belarus, Kazakhstan and Ukraine all inherited a part of the Soviet arsenal that was on their territory,” said Nunn.

“But after a lot of work in the Clinton administration, and people didn’t realize that was going on, we and Russia working together got three of those countries to give up their nuclear weapons.”

Both the U.S. and Russia have much smaller inventories now than during the peak of the Cold War.

“We’ve gotten rid of a lot of the most destabilizing weapons, which are the theater short range nuclear weapons that were stationed in Europe by the Soviets and by the United States,” said Nunn.

“We still have too many of them, but those are the most destabilizing weapons because you deploy them near the front lines which means if there is a war, all of a sudden the commander has got to make a decision.”

“Do you get permission and use them, permission from the president, or do you let them get overrun and captured?”

Relating decisions about the usage of nuclear weapons to presidential politics, Nunn served under six presidents during his terms as a Senator:

Presidents Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton. As commander-in-chief, presidents have the sole authority to authorize the use of nuclear weapons.

“It is a moral question, but every military commander is charged with the responsibility of carrying out orders from the commander-in-chief,” said Nunn.

“But those orders have to be moral orders, and how do you determine that?”

“Do you have 10 New York lawyers come in in the middle of a crisis and say, ‘This is legal and moral’? No, so it gets down to judgment.”

One way a president could reduce the risk of nuclear war is deterrence by promise of retaliation and assuring survivability.

“The problem today that I think we could cut some of the risks, certainly not all of it, [is] if we made a position known in America that we will not use nuclear weapons first, we would only use them in response,” said Nunn.

“Now to do that, you have to be able to survive a nuclear attack.”

However, he believes this is not the best solution.

“Anyone that has really looked at this and thinks deterrence is going to prevent nuclear use forever, I think is postulating a best case which is highly unlikely, and so I think we have to begin to rope off the existential interests we have with countries like Russia and China and we have to have disagreements in a lot of other areas, but still come back and say, ‘We’ve got to deal with each other, we have mutual interest of survivability,’” said Nunn.

In conclusion, Nunn reiterates there is currently less of a chance of premeditated nuclear attacks than there was during the Cold War, but with a more compressed decision time for leaders, there is a higher risk of a mistake.

“We’ve got a lot of work to do so that our children and grandchildren can live in a world that does not have the perils of nuclear, biological and climate change, all of those things hanging over us,” said Nunn.