With barely two weeks remaining before mid-term elections, it is high time to mobilize our community to vote.

It is great that the Downstate N.Y. Division of the Polish American Congress (PAC) has conducted its registration drive for three years, encouraging people to register to vote. Although PAC has not managed to conduct its initiative on a large scale or encourage other organizations to follow in its footsteps, thanks to its initiative, close to 1,000 Poles got a chance to participate in the process of choosing legislators who, to a great extend, can make decisions that impact your life.

This year, a couple of the candidates running for local and state positions are of Polish origin, among them 26-year old Aleksander Powietrzynski, a lawyer and political scientist. His decision to run is not a passing whim, but a well thought-out plan. All the more so that, as a fairly unknown individual, he is not running for governor, but starting off on a more humble level and eyeing a seat at the New York State Assembly.

Polish blood also runs in the Staten Island attorney general, Dan Donovan. His mother's grandfathers came to the United States from Poland and, as he says himself, he never forgot about his background. On November 2, he will be fighting for votes that will guarantee him a position as state attorney general.

Politicians have a huge impact on the life of our neighborhoods, including street safety, the quality of the infrastructure, and the quality of education in public schools, as well as access to important offices, institutions, health care, stores, mass transit and employment. It is also up to them to decide who gets lucrative contracts for jobs commissioned by federal and local institutions. At times, it would seem that it is only our ethnic group that does not realize these factors, as if we did not care at all.

Even after living on this side of the pond for dozens of years, we have not managed to familiarize ourselves thoroughly with the American system and customs. We are stuck in a fallacy that, regardless of our passive attitude, somehow we are going to end up getting what others get because we are entitled to it. This could not be further from the truth, however. What is worse, American Poles who were born and raised on the American continent do not show more prudence. Or they keep it to themselves. Anyhow, such a conclusion can be drawn when we observe most Polish-American organizations and associations.

If we don't want to end up just lamenting and complaining and truly are going to take matters into our own hands, collectively we should proceed to the polls. In this day and age, an individual vote may be less important, but the mass still makes an impression.

Let's hope that in our community, which is striving for ideals, we will do away with appeals that took place a couple years ago directed against political candidates of Polish origin and aimed to support representatives of other communities, because they were thought to better represent us.