I know for a fact no one in an emergency would ever call on these losers for help. Useless.
Like the conservatives got all this via voting but tell me how voting is meaningless?
a rabid white minority gets shit done BECAUSE they have no hesitation about identifying institutionalized power as the most important power, BECAUSE they don’t whine about the terrible ideological burden posed by casting a ballot
but sure. voting mysteriously becomes meaningless & seeking institutionalized power becomes silly cringe behavior only when it’s NOT primarily white men seeking power to act in the interests of white men at the expense of everyone else. sure.
One thing to remember however: this didn’t happen overnight.
This has happened over forty years of slowly picking away at democracy with votes and legislation and policy and conviction. Forty years of slow wearing down, of teaching Americans that they’re special and that they deserve peace and prosperity and never having to make hard choices between the bad and the worse.
It’s true that your vote in the next elections may make little difference this year. But the votes that the conservatives gained in 1980 didn’t make much difference either: at least, not that year. But they kept voting. And they kept voting. And they persuaded others to keep voting along with them.
And forty years later, you’re staring down the barrel of a dysfunctional democracy, and what looks like it’s very much going to turn into a Christian theocracy. (I am deeply cynical that it will stop at Roe v Wade. Deeply cynical.)
Do you have the courage to stand up and fight for the rest of your life? Do you have the vision to plant trees for an orchard you’ll never get to enjoy? Do you understand the weight of one vote and one vote and one vote and one vote and one vote, year after year after election after election after decade after decade?
Or do you just want “one and done”?
The dude in the tweet above wants “one and done”. He’s not willing to put his shoulder to the wheel and work for his democracy. Look, he’s not unusual in that - the truth is that most Americans aren’t. They were taught that the world they inhabited wasn’t just a privilege that they enjoyed but their right to have and to keep without expending any effort to ensure that it remained so.
It’s true that after the next election, things will look no better than before the election. But keep pushing at the election after that, and the election after that, and the election after that…
Don’t want to expend the energy?
Then STFU about the broken system! It was your lack of expended energy - or the energy you spent persuading others that ‘marginal change’ was just as bad as ‘no change at all’ (*coughs*NeverHillary*coughs*) - that contributed to the broken system today. Put in the work - put it in over the time period that the conservatives who are now shaping your world against your wishes did - and you might very well see the results.
The current state of American politics didn’t happen overnight, but it did happen.
Changing it won’t happen overnight, but it will happen - if you work to make it happen.
If the left stops voting then the right would just dominate and it will get worse.
Simply voting for the president won’t matter. You need to vote in local and state elections. You have to pay attention to the stances of the candidates.
Go to primaries. Support progressive candidates and push for them. Help do campaign work. Help advertise the stances.
Also pay attention to what is going on and voice your opinions to them. Especially for local issues.
I have this fantasy that I can go back in time and get everyone who voted in 2008 to also have voted in 2010. Imagine how much better the country would have been had the GOP not had any power at all after the Bush debacle?
But nope. We handed the house to the GOP a mere 2 years after starting to clean up their mess. And as a result, almost nothing got done and the government was shut down a couple times.
The GOP is going full fash. Getting them out of power is, like, the very least you can do to stop them.
- Roe v. Wade being overturned was only able to happen because conservatives have a 6 to 3 supreme court majority.
- Conservatives have that majority because they got to place 3 judges.
- They got to place three judges because they won the 2016 presidential election.
The Roe v. Wade decision can be traced back to a single critical election loss using only three logical steps and morons like this are still saying voting doesn’t matter. This was an election in which many self identified progressives chose not to vote, and looking at the numbers it could have been won if more progressives had voted. If this doesn’t cement a decision to vote in every single election you possibly can for the rest of your life then you simply are not paying attention.
This is a particularly dramatic and straightforward example of the principle talked about above: Elections shape the future, not the present, and we often don’t feel the real consequences of a win or loss for years. Every election matters.
If you do not strategically vote you are not progressive. Strategically you are centrist.
anyone who tries to convince you there’s no point in voting is ACTIVELY TRYING TO SUPPRESS YOUR VOTE.
