The Vine Party Presidential Candidate

In recent news, a vine has become an actual candidate with 9% popularity votes in a poll. Things like this can hint at how much power the younger generations have in the world we live in.

Selina Fluty, Editor of Student Opinion

It’s 2016, and time for a new President. The liberals are shouting for Bernie Sanders, others are voting for Donald Trump in the poll, and 9% of a majority poll in Iowa wants Deez Nuts for President of the United States.

If you haven’t heard, the phrase “deez nuts” has been around on television for a while and as the name of an Australian band, but the phrase gained popularity when Vine user Welvin Harris posted a video including the catchphrase in March 2015. For a while, almost all you saw was that Vine and jokes about it. The phrase was extremely popular and was even talked about offline.

The thing is that now, according to Time Magazine, a 15-year-old boy by the name of Brady Olson registered as third-party candidate Deez Nuts.

Since Olson is too young to legally be voted President, and his political campaign is basically just for kicks. But, seriously, Nuts has been bringing up a ton of votes in the poll, ranking as one of the most popular third-party candidates in over two decades, according to Time. It’s hilarious. When the internet got it, people were making posts about not wasting votes on Deez Nuts (rest assured – if you voted for him in the polls, it won’t affect your real vote), reposting purposely terrible Photoshop campaign posters, even creating fanfiction about the presidential candidates in love with Deez Nuts. It was like a field day for the internet.

But think about what this means. If a high schooler from Iowa can make the internet riot for days, so much so that democratic candidate Bernie Sanders gained time in the spotlight from an endorsement from Nuts, then think about what we, a bunch of teenagers with political opinions and opinions in general, can do if we put our minds to it? Singers like Lorde and Halsey started out at a young age, and are now extremely popular, Lorde being featured in the “Hunger Games” movies. Beethoven was writing music at 13-years-old. Geniuses realize they’re, well, geniuses at this age.

What people don’t really seem to get, from what I’ve seen, is that teenagers have a lot of power and potential. We’re figuring out who we are right now. It’s that weird age where you don’t quite know how being an adult fully works, but you know you aren’t a kid. Suddenly, college and graduating becomes something that’s happening very soon. Suddenly, we realize that we have a voice. We start arguing with our parents and winning. We start experimenting; we start understanding what influence politics really has on us, we start understanding that we can change things. We’re put into this world where we are allowed to change something, so we latch onto it.

If someone ever tells me that teenagers are only obsessed with partying and our phones, then they don’t quite realize that very few teenagers are actually like that. Some of us have mental disorders, eating disorders, physical disabilities, struggles at school or home or both, mental wars with our self image. But we can change the world. We have an effect on the world, and rarely do we even realize it. Olson, the face behind Nuts, has shown us teenagers that we all have the ability to change the world, no matter how small we may think we are.

Let’s take the planet by storm, shall we?