by William Skink
I mentioned in an earlier post that the interest in how down-ticket political races could be negatively impacted by the presidential campaigns has been primarily focused on Trump and Republicans. When the focus is on Democrats, much of what I have read has been efforts to scare-shame disillusioned millennials away from voting 3rd party.
But what about those of us refusing to vote altogether?
Last night I made sure I wasn’t voting by burning my ballot. I’m not just apathetically not voting, I’m emphatically not voting. There is a difference, and today a piece by Lara Gardner explaining why she’s not voting articulated this difference way better than I could (I wrote and performed a terrible song instead). From the link:
So many have said to me that not voting is not going to change anything and that it is simply giving up. I disagree with this. Not voting is a legitimate non-violent means to proving a government is not sanctioned by its people. South Africa endured many years of violence under the Apartheid regime. Many people and countries worldwide boycotted Apartheid, yet in spite of this, the US government insisted on supporting Apartheid, saying that while the US abhorred Apartheid, the regime was the legitimate government of South Africa. After an Apartheid election where no more than seven percent of South Africans voted, suddenly things changed. The world could no longer accept that the regime was legitimate because so few of the governed participated in the election process. The ANC, which prior had been treated as a terrorist group trying to overthrow a legitimate government, became freedom fighters against a government that did not have the consent of the South African people.
Read the whole article, it’s great. Or, if you’re not in the reading mood, here is my little acoustic ditty using some of the ugly language the candidates have used–grabbing pussies and killing heads of state, respectively–with a little profanity-laced disdain for the evil globalists pushing the world into another global war. Enjoy!
It was a hell of a run.
http://fredoneverything.org/ready-ronald-mcdonald-or-lucretia-borgia-in-the-long-run-we-are-all-dead/
Feel sorry for my kids.
Thanks for Fred. And thanks William. Another one that got away. Look on the bright side, the kids won’t have to take on huge debt, we already did that for them — like everything else — it’s stick-a-fork-in-it time. Nor will they know, with the re-marketing of mind control as evolution and freedom, and all that goes with it.
Who’s William?
For some reason CounterPunch pulled the Gardner article. Here’s to link to it at HP:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/why-im-not-voting_us_5804384be4b06f314afeb725
Gardner gets it. Progressivism has become nothing more than a Sisyphean myth. Best to get out of the way before the next time the rock comes rolling down, and go do something else. Such wasted effort that could be put to much better use.
Here’s an interesting graphic presentation of how much support Clinton and Trump got during the primaries: only 9% of Americans (total) or 14% of eligible voters brought us this choice. I, for one, am not willing to decide how to vote based the pathetic choices of others that I, like Gardner, find abhorrent.
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/08/01/us/elections/nine-percent-of-america-selected-trump-and-clinton.html?_r=0
So, like Gardner, I find that when such a small minority of people who are eligible to participate in an election bring us these horrible choices for our next president (and for many presidents previously), that the government has lost the legitimacy of the governed.
IMO burning your ballot doesn’t solve anything – just remember, that even though we are stuck with two lemons for POTUS that the State races have much more effect on our lives. A better protest would be to leave all the circles white on races that tick you off.
I mailed my ballot back last Saturday, and held my nose and voted for the Donald.
A key point in Gardner’s article isn’t who does or doesn’t vote for a residential [sic] candidate. It is about turnout. As in apartheid South Africa. At some point turnout gets low enough to discredit the legitimacy of the electoral system, and of our federal government.
Is turning out to vote for local elections and issues important enough to add another tick to the turnout totals? The powers that be are counting on it.
To get the “media-multiplier effect” there’s still time for a rally on the courthouse lawn for a public display of the 21st-Century version of burning one’s draft card in the 1960’s. Obama and Clinton have been pounding the MSM with the terms “democracy” and “our democracy” lately. Maybe something’s ripe enough there’s no excaping the stench from coast to coast — ergo, the oft-repeated holding of noses.
We’ll meet again, some sunny day.