Dear Urban Outfitters:

“Voting is for Old People.” That’s the slogan on a shirt for sale on your catalog Web site. I looked at it yesterday and couldn’t believe my eyes. That’s what I call a “wardrobe malfunction!”

It’s not a bad-looking T-shirt – Vintage baseball, for $28.00! – and comes in cotton, several colors, and lots of sizes. Made in the USA. However, you simply must rethink the message. Use something else to sell shirts, especially in an election year.

I know you have to be edgy to move the merchandise with Gen X, Y and Z. Sex sells. Why not stick with that? It’s less pernicious than this anti-voting message you’re sending to a huge segment of the population – the next generation of voters and a group we should be working hard to enfranchise. After all, their voting patterns will have a lot to do with what happens for us “old people.” Isn’t Medicaid and Social Security in their hands?

Here’s the problem: Lots of people died for the right to vote, again and again. Voting is for brave people.

Like the great-grandmothers of the kids buying your shirt, who marched en masse, chained themselves to polling places, and went to jail for the right to vote. A constitutional amendment was passed before women were given the right to vote. (Constitutional amendments are to be used to grant rights, not abrogate them … but that’ll have to be another letter.) Voting is for daring, impassioned people.

On Feb. 17, Jimmy Lee Jackson was shot in Alabama while protesting for voting rights. On March 7, 1965 some 600 people marched on Selma, Ala., to draw attention to the hundreds of potential voters being denied the right to register at the Dallas County courthouse. As they crossed the Edmund Pettus bridge they were violently confronted by 200 state troopers. Seventeen of marchers were hospitalized.

On March 21, Viola Liuzzo of Detroit, Mich., a 39-year-old white volunteer, was shot dead by four Ku Klux Klan members following a rally on the steps of the state capitol.

These protesters are the grand parents of Urban Outfitter customers. Which is to say, within living memory people of color in this country were denied access to the right to vote until the Voting Rights Act was passed in August of 1965. It took another ten years, before congress expanded the protection to Americans who did not speak English.

In 1994, when 17 million black South Africans voted for the first time, Nelson Mandela said, “Today is like no other before it. Voting in our first free and fair election has begun. Today marks the dawn of our freedom.” This is within living memory of the twenty-something men and women shopping for your T-shirts. Black South Africans stood in the hot sun for hours, in lines that were miles long, in order to cast their vote. Every time a vote is cast it defies oppression. Voting is for free people, but free people must guard the privilege.

In Florida during the last presidential election, legally cast votes were agonized over for weeks, then thrown out or disqualified – and it changed the outcome of the election. It changed history. Voting is for everyone – if everyone is vigilant and observant.

Foreign countries new to the ballot box look to America to oversee their elections. Former President Jimmy Carter traveled to Haiti to provide some assurance of fair elections. Voting is a right to be safeguarded – especially when oppression seems to be popping up in new forms.

The struggle to vote isn’t over, but it’s a battle against a more insidious threat. Legislation may have secured legal rights, but motivational rights seem to be up for grabs as the next generation of voters has their hard- won rights snidely co-opted while on-line shopping. Voting is just too precious a privilege to be exposed to a snide remark on a T-shirt – a wise guy comment used to sell dumb gear. Elevate voting – don’t relegate it to shameless commerce.

The crown of democracy, voting rights, was paid for by the blood and tears of millions. Those of us who wear this crown should never be complacent about its cost.

So I’ll buy a T-shirt that says: “Every vote counts. Count every vote.”

Will you make it, Urban Outfitters? I think you owe us.

Todd R. Nelson is an associate editor of Hope magazine. He lives in Castine.