You can walk into almost any American high school right now and feel it. Students aren’t just frustrated. They’re disillusioned. The message we’re hearing isn’t “get involved,” it’s “good luck.”

We’re told to pick a side, vote blue or red, join a cause, or take a stand. But when you’re inside the system, when you see firsthand how outdated, slow, and unaccountable it really is, the idea of choosing a side becomes absurd. It’s like choosing between two captains on a sinking ship.

My generation isn’t tuning out because we don’t care. We’re tuning out because the entire structure of American politics feels rigged for theater, not for outcomes. The debate stage gets more airtime than the budget. Symbolism beats strategy. And every issue, from housing to healthcare to public education, becomes a tribal fight instead of a solvable problem.

We’re not apathetic. We’re done pretending the current model still works.

We need to make systems that don’t care about sides.

The problems my generation faces aren’t ideological. They’re operational.

Student debt and food insecurity aren’t partisan issues. Infrastructure decay, collapsing mental health support, and outdated curricula are not left vs. right debates. They’re systems that aren’t delivering, period.

And yet our politics keeps framing every failure as a moral question instead of a design flaw. This makes reform nearly impossible. Instead of asking what works, we ask who’s to blame.

The result is gridlock. And the cost is paid by the people who can least afford it: young people, low-income families, and those without political capital.

We don’t want control. We want coherence.

When I talk to students in my district, my city, and across the state, I hear this: They’re not looking for power. They’re looking for function.

They want transportation systems that show up, housing policies that don’t collapse under NIMBY pressure, and schools that prepare them for real life, not recycled civics myths. They want to know what a policy does, not just what it represents.

Most of all, they want systems that don’t need to be believed in… because they already work.

Post-partisan does NOT mean neutral. It means useful.

This isn’t a call for centrism. It’s a call for precision. The old left-right spectrum doesn’t reflect how we think anymore. It doesn’t map to how we work, build, learn, or vote.

Young people today move differently. We collaborate across ideologies. We work in decentralized groups. We care about results, not reputations. When something’s broken, we don’t argue about it for five election cycles. We build around it.

What comes next isn’t a new political party. It’s a new political operating system. One focused on throughput, accountability, and scalable design.

Where this starts:

If we’re serious about fixing democracy, we need to stop idolizing the debate and start fixing the delivery. That means:

— Making laws that expire if they don’t perform

— Creating real-time scoreboards for public institutions

— Teaching students not just how government works, but how to measure if it’s working

— Incentivizing governance that scales, not just wins headlines

None of this is radical. It’s basic infrastructure logic, and it’s what young people are already doing in our own spaces, from civic tech to mutual aid to digital education platforms.

We are not waiting for permission. We’re building workarounds. The real question is whether anyone in power is paying attention.

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Princeton Lock is a student at Newport High School and the Project Lead of Youth Finance University, a student-led initiative providing free financial education to elementary and middle school students.

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