Go vote. Make the time.

Don’t know what’s important enough for your vote? The IWiLL and judicial retention are two causes you should absolutely support, unless you enjoy staying inside and fear mongering about “the gays.”

The thing is, all of those people — people who actually care about this sort of thing — are the ones who do vote. If you’re upset with the way things are, you need to get out and do something about it. Angry townies are the reason the bar age is 21. If you think a couch would really tie your porch together, or that your five-bedroom house might be more affordable if it weren’t illegal to rent to more than three people, maybe you should consider voting in city council elections — or, better yet, running.

Do you really want to fire three people for upholding a pragmatic ruling? Even if the justices are removed from their positions, that ruling still stands. It should stand. Denying marriage licenses based on sexual orientation is of no significant interest to the government — or anyone else — for that matter.

If you don’t like LGBT marriage, that is your decision. Don’t project it onto anyone else.

The great nation our grandparents talk about — the nation that defied the notion that life had limitations, that boundaries existed for any other reason than to be broken — that’s the America we want to live in.

Whether the American dream of our grandparents is a pipe dream is something that has yet to be seen.

Empires crumble for political reasons. We’ve gone from a handful of colonists who were unhappy about being reamed for tax dollars, to an entire nation too entitled to support itself.

You have to be the change you want to see in the world. We’re not trying to blow sunshine anywhere it doesn’t, but take those words to heart.

Politics matter enough to put effort into the process. People far braver than us fought — and died — so you could have the luxury of ignoring the voting booth.

The “change” President Barack Obama talked about two years ago wasn’t the overnight variety. Reforming our politics is an ongoing process, and it’s going to take more than two elections to get things squared away.

It may take many elections, and in some of those elections the focal point might not be who wins office, but instead, who is kept in office.

Will we, as Iowans, decide that if we don’t like certain judicial decisions that we will simply vote out those that make them? What if these decisions have only restored liberty to people? Will our votes reflect a need to strip others of their ability to pursue happiness?

We, at the Iowa State Daily staff, can only hope that Iowa’s voting will reflect attitudes of benevolence, ideologies of liberty and, most importantly, thought processes based off of facts.

As John Adams once said, “Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.”

Red, blue, green, purple, whatever — just vote for the common good. We’re all in this together.