(October 5, 2023 at 10:13 am)The Grand Nudger Wrote:(October 5, 2023 at 8:14 am)Angrboda Wrote: I think you would find it worse if every four years it was significantly different. Some of those anniversaries would be a real bitch. Does January 6th ring a bell? Democracies move slowly. To expect them to change at a pace that is meaningfully significant over such a short span is to misunderstand both change and the nature of democracy.
Our system has changed plenty over the span of my politically aware life. Trouble is, it's been for the worse. The political equivalent, I suppose, of the whole speed of a lie thing.
It makes absolutely no sense, imo, to acknowledge things like extreme gerrymandering, the corporate takeover of policy by way of unlimited speechbux, bipartisan institutional corruption, and the abandonment of the constituency at the end of campaigning season while simultaneously insisting that people whose votes literally do not matter are the problem with our government and why bad shit keeps happening. That's not true, and it's an especially laughable claim that the reason that the reds keep winning is that the blues don't get enough votes...on the tacit assumption that I would even vote blue.....which is a weird one, for all the times I mention that I'm not a dem. The blues have been getting more votes than the reds for decades, I'll just keep reminding everyone of this. It's not a little, it's a lot, and for a long time....and this is the result.
Plenty of people seem to think that it's odd for a non voter to feel any sort of way about this..but, obviously, I wish it were different. I'm not an apathetic non voter. Non cooperation is the final form of protest, when action fails or simply cannot succeed. No one wants to buy into every little white lie we tell ourselves like I do - I just can't, and likewise I can't blame people for shit I know they have no hand in even if I wish there really were someone to blame. Jan6 was rough, but validating. People have been calling me a nut (here and elsewhere) for years for mentioning that christian white supremacists were engaged in an increasingly successful takeover of government and that the reds were being activated like fucking insurgents. I still think that the real tragedy of the day is that they weren't mown down. We put up with it, we allowed it, we seemed to believe it was so clownish it would burn itself out, and we ostracized people who knew what it was and that it wouldn't. We couldn't have set ourselves up for jan6 better than we did. Even the people there that day and charged with protecting the capital did this in that moment.
From my perspective, so long as we're willing to accept voting as a choice between lesser evils we, as voters, cannot complain about the evil we electively effect. We wanted it, we voted for it, we accepted that framing. It's not even on the politicians for going along with it. That didn't happen because of non voters, and it will absolutely not get better until we reject it. I know, I know, the fear is that if we reject that framing by refusing to be complicit The Other Guy will win. Firstly, I literally am that other guy, or at least I was in a saner iteration of government..and, secondly, the other other guy is going to take advantage regardless and all they need to do that is the appearance of legitimacy through cooperation in a sham process.
1) I'm not blaming voters for the ills of the country. I'm blaming those who don't take action to try and effect change.
2) False equivalence is false. One "Guy" wants to strip us of rights, as you may (or may not) have noticed. That the "Other Guy" also does crooked shit at times in no way makes them equal, just as a shoplifter is not as bad as a murderer.
3) You say you've seen plenty of change even over your own lifetime. What have you done to try and effect it? Refuse to vote? Let me know how that works out for you.
In a phrase, you're letting the perfect be the enemy of the better.
