It’s gubernatorial debate season. For those of us lucky or prudent enough to vote, this means we have an opportunity not to screw up our futures. So what should we do?

So far this college has been particularly vocal and active concerning three things: restoring our budget, diversity (including promoting aids to education for AB540, foreign, LGBT and disabled students), and being a green campus. Of course, there are outliers to this crudely general statistic, but let’s just take these three examples as campaigns that almost everyone on campus would get really nervous about opposing in front of a crowd of their peers.

Regardless of our interests, it makes little sense to vote for candidates who have virtually no support; Rasmussen Reports says likely voters are split around 49-44 in favor of Jerry Brown, with only four percent preferring another candidate. At this point we’re pretty much down to Meg or Jerry – so you may as well pick the one that’s going to make things better for community college students.

Both candidates have enticing morsels to offer us young folk, once you get past the inevitable mudslinging: Meg wants to protect the environment, make California richer, and give more power to local organizations and governments. Jerry wants to focus on promoting community colleges and transfer systems, and pay particular attention to ESL students and low-income families, gay rights, women’s rights and green energy.

Meg supports small businesses and high-paying manufacturing jobs. But hang on a minute. If she wants to protect the little guys, why does she want to make illegal-immigrant inspections of workplaces akin to drug seizures? And if she wants to make the government more efficient, why is she supporting the same requirement for a two-thirds majority for any budget decision, while at the same time making legislative jobs part-time and lower-paid?

Jerry’s slip-up in his pitch to us college students is that his basic approach to promising us a job market by the time we graduate is to promote clean energy. Granted, it’s a wide-ranging field and there will be many opportunities for potential employers in many fields and levels of education and expertise, but as someone who is looking for a non-engineering-related career, this isn’t exceptionally promising.

The bottom line is that we as a community college are beginning to explore the extent of our influence in the political process. Your scrawl in a check box now is going to decide what happens to this state by the time you get out of this mess.