I’m going to tell you to vote, tell you how voting is your civic duty and that in some countries a citizen’s civic duty is to agree with the government or die. Hell, I may even tell you how your vote counts after all that your individual preference of president, out of the 318.9 million Americans, can change the tides. It can, really, mathematically.

But, like math, you already kind of knew all this, at least in a ghostly, intangible, “yeah, fractions are definitely a thing somehow” kind of way, so I won’t waste your time like you will be on Nov. 8 if, at this point, you have done nothing more than read pro-Trump or pro-Hilary tweets while pooping.

Voting is your civic duty, our civic duty, but it means a universe more than standing in line at our old elementary school, thinking about how small the lockers are before pressing a button before going home.  It means educating ourselves, taking it upon ourselves to dig into these candidates and pull from sources outside of our web of social media. It means to look around our neighborhoods and cities to figure what the heck is going wrong in the world and who the heck can fix it.

Let’s get bigger. At the beginning of this year we had a gallery full of talking meatbags vying to be president. Now we have two. One is bringing lynching back in style and the other might live off the souls of foreign children. Not anything new every election features two candidates with their own terror to them. However, it is a lot scarier when we choose to have no say in what two candidates end up being on the table.

To not take action in our presidential candidates early, like volunteering for their campaign or even doing your own research on them, is to sit at a table, ignore the menu and be outraged when the waiter brings out a turd sandwich or a giant douche soup as the entrée.

Responsible, educational voting is getting up from the table and asking who the hell keeps serving turd sandwiches for dinner and fixing our own meal.

Maybe we don’t have time to volunteer for your candidate’s campaign, I get that, but when we believe in our candidates then at the very least let’s be OK with having a dialogue talk about them. Screw manners, screw being politically correct. Get in an argument, feel good when you win it, admit when you’re wrong, but God forbid I have to make more small talk on Kim Kardashian for the sake of politeness. I guess talking about Clinton’s foreign policy doesn’t make people want to take shots.

Dialogue makes a difference, believe it or not. I don’t know who dropped the hammer on politics being a sensitive subject to talk about (maybe because it actually matters?) but it just cannot be said that the conversation goes nowhere. I don’t know how “Stranger Things” got so popular other than from the fans proclaiming that people needed to watch it. I’ve heard more heated discussions about “Breaking Bad” than Hilary’s secret emails.

So vote. Take part of the election on Nov. 8. Wear the “I Voted” sticker. But arrive to the polls with a confidence that says that we utilized our technology—the ones that can change our faces to puppies and let us download The Beatles anthology—to make an informed decision about our future.

That kind of confidence changes the distrust in our political system to confidence, if not a confidence that a dedicated involvement in our government can result in a better country, then a confidence that says “I don’t like this, so I’m going to be president.”

By the way, in some countries, a citizen’s civic duty involves agreeing with the government or dying.