Voting must be used or we could lose it

This is the unique beauty of entering a polling station in a functioning democracy. That election day when I was 19, I left the polling station and felt a strange absence. I was following politics from age 11 — not because my parents were activists or otherwise engaged in politics; I was just weird that way. So I don’t think other teenagers are — or should be — likely to feel the way I did about the political process. So what does it say about our cultural values that we have no ritual around voting, no rite-of-passage tradition, no social fostering and celebration of that first-vote moment?