Welcome to Iowa, where the smell of hog confineries waft by cornfields as Tulsi Gabbard’s smiling face looms over I-80 on a billboard. On Main Street, storefronts sit empty as razors scrape off window chalk. I make eye contact with my tenured professor who caucused for Joe Biden. I give him a tepid two-finger wave.

My parents’ generation claims that “young people are the future of this country.” This statement overlooks the fact that we are the present and that we may not have a future. Our water is poisoned, our rivers are rising, people cannot afford to visit the doctor, and no one I know will ever be able to afford to buy a home. That is why I have spent the past six months working to elect Bernie Sanders for president.

At this moment, big money and establishment Democrats are moving to put forth Joe Biden as the nominee. It is clear they are denying young people the path towards a better world out of their own fear and self-preservation. But Biden failed to secure a single delegate for the county convention. That is not how you win a swing state.

The Bernie campaign, on the other hand, activated Iowans who had previously never been engaged by the political process. We did this by knocking on doors other campaigns wouldn’t, getting kicked out of trailer parks, and meeting people with the issues that matter to them. Whether outside the dining hall on campus or in towns nearby, I began with the question, “What is an issue that is affecting yourself or someone you love?” This was often met with a flustered, “I don’t know.”

After a moment of weighted silence, I’d follow up by asking what their life would be like if they were able to attend college without any debt.

For myself, going to my private college was substantially cheaper than attending a public university in Iowa. I will graduate this year with $12,000 in student loans despite receiving sizable financial aid and working three jobs. But I will be graduating in a substantially better position than friends from my hometown, three hours west.

My friends at Iowa’s public university system were priced out. They faced 5 per cent tuition increases each year and were left without resources, struggling to pay for their basic needs. Many of them returned home after a year or two and picked back up minimum wage jobs with the cruel optimism that something would change to allow them to get back to the classroom.

I’d come home for breaks and feel alienated from these friends and my community. This tension was supposed to make me feel like I had succeeded but instead left me with an immense feeling of guilt. This is what education under the current system does: it tears people apart under the guise of striving. This is why I know we need free college for all and true debt forgiveness. I want myself and the people I love to be liberated from dread.

Super Tuesday: Bernie Sanders casts vote in Burlington

Super Tuesday: Bernie Sanders casts vote in Burlington

Young people don’t want a politician to be our grandparent — we want our grandparents to age without putting our families into debt. We don’t want access to health insurance, we want Medicare for All. We don’t want technocratic plans, we want a movement that is going to materially improve our lives. In my time working for Bernie Sanders, it has been clear that he is the only candidate that understands this.

In Iowa, the Bernie campaign helped students organize and build power from the bottom up. We are running fossil fuel divestment campaigns and marching for a Green New Deal. We are challenging our board of regents, our for-profit education system, and are unionizing our student workers on campus.