I just turned fourteen, which is very exciting for several reasons. Firstly, I am able to legally be on someone’s payroll, so they can stop paying me with discreet cash handed to me under a folding-table. Secondly, I am six years away from voting in my first election. I have an elaborate plan, which goes as follows:

The Monday evening beforehand, I will binge-watch every debate. I will then take my specially-ordered white t-shirt, tie-dye it blue, and add on all the stickers of my preferred candidate along with perhaps some artful decorations. I will wake up at 5:30 the next morning and prepare myself pancakes. If I have time, I’ll make one in the shape of the candidate I oppose’s first initial and burn it. If not, I’ll read the paper. At 8:46 I will get in line to vote, after standing with a sign out there for an hour. I will punch my name in the ballot machine and then I’ll go off to school, but not before kissing a staffer. It’s a liberal thing.

The midterms this year were a sad time. They were made up of inevitability and glimmers of surprise, just enough to make you think something was going to happen, but then it didn’t. I watched the DC mayoral election twenty times more closely than anyone I know, and I in fact told at least five adults who to vote for-all of whom, I presume, heeded my advice. Then I wore my Obama t-shirt and watched Anderson Cooper press fancy pants screens and say “Wolf, back to you” so many times it started to crack me up and then the next day whenever I spoke on the phone I would end my comments with “Wolf, back to you.”

Because, no matter how it is construed otherwise, I am a stakeholder in this election and all the ones coming after and before it. I was born smack in the middle of the Bush/Gore debacle. The results of that election have most literally dictated the world as I know it. I have grown up used to seeing countries with a lot of sand on the cover of the newspaper and assuming we’ve screwed something up again. In 2018, when I’ll miss the voting deadline by mere weeks, I’ll be in my first year of college, getting ready to enter the workforce some candidate will create for me. I will pay the taxes which candidates I couldn’t vote for decided on for me and get ready to vote having gone through 19 years of selling cookies at the bake-sale at my elementary school on election day and watching worn-out adults emerge from the polls and tell their friends they voted for the one with the same first name as their brother-in-law (actually happened, in 2012-which makes me wonder if the brother-in-law was named Barack?). The passive participant, but the active victim.

Related to that last sentence, I propose two solutions (as a fourteen year old, I am what is known as a reputable source.) Number one: Let high schoolers vote when they turn 15. Give them their formative years to get involved, before we burn out. Feed the flame with fuel, not water. Don’t tell us we have to wait until we can’t care as much to do something, let us participate in whatever democracy you propose we’re getting. It’s the least you can do having driven all those damn SUVs into the atmosphere. (Also worth mentioning: the voting rights issue is a nonstarter, GOP folks. We’re a democracy, anyone who’s not a slave votes, done deal.) Number two is my crowning achievement. I devised it during health class and snuck my phone out to text my dad. He said it was a good idea but I didn’t tell him I was texting in health class. If we won’t involve young people, we’ll just involve the ones I call “doners.” Their world has already been settled, and their ambitions focus on the generation to come, not their own. Other, less innovative people call them adults. We shall adopt a system of anonymous voting for midterms. Nobody knows the candidates or who they are-just their assigned letter. Each candidate expresses views on no more than 21 major local/national/international issues in two sentences in a local news outlet. If you read it and care, vote. If you would rather live in Russia, do not vote. If you’re an illegal immigrant, assume the identity of the aforementioned Communists and get your lazy asses (joke) to the voting polls.

My generation has already been handed a messed-up planet. And, like all other generations, we will also be handed a messed-up political system. The only people who have true passion and the power to make a long-term change are the ones inheriting the world. That’s me. I’m inheriting the world, and as I do so I’m watching those who have already had their go at it squander away their votes in decisions which more often than not are based less on politics than on who’s going to mess up less. And that’s where the real decision comes through-young people don’t have that mindset. We don’t think in terms of who’s going to mess up less, and whose party has messed up less. We think in terms of who’s going to shape a planet we want to live in. Because we’re entering, not exiting. We haven’t lost the idealism yet. So hand over the baton, doners. Thank you very much, but it’s our turn now, and we like it.