politics

The video that reminds us exactly why the US election is so important.

The US election is now less than one week away, after months of build-up and cutthroat campaigning.

The media, both social and mainstream, has saturated readers with one outrageous headline after another as both sides scramble to get ahead.

It’s exhausting. The shock factor of Trump seems to have died out almost as strongly as the wow factor of Hilary.

A video uploaded last week hopes to change that with one simple reminder of why the events of next week and every week after that still matters.

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The video features 60-year-old Vickie Wilkinson dissolving into tears while sitting in the car beside her daughter.

“Mum, why are you crying?” daughter Sarah Dean asks.

“I got to vote for a woman for president,” she replies.

The mother and daughter had just driven to a polling centre in Bozeman, Montana in order to cast a vote.

Dean uploaded the video and watched as it was swiftly picked up by media outlets worldwide.

Wilkinson told The Huffington Post she had been brought to tears thinking about how much women had sacrificed to be able to vote for a female candidate.

“To think about how far we’ve come,” she said.

“The fight and struggle just to vote for an intelligent, qualified, viable woman ― it was just sort of overwhelming to me on that morning.”

Vickie Wilkinson. (Source: Instagram.)

The 60-year-old went on to explain how her parents had divorced during a time when banks could deny women loans if there was no man to co-sign.

“My mother couldn’t get credit. She couldn’t buy a car without a male signature. She couldn’t get an apartment without a male signature," she said.

"I’m 60 years old and this is the first time in my life, and anybody’s life here, that we’ve actually had a viable woman candidate for president of the United States."

The video has received almost two thousand views and hundreds of comments since it was uploaded.

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