Attention nonparticipants
Nov. 6th, 2002 11:42 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
substituteThis is for all you Green-voting, non-voting, "anarchist" types who don't vote because "they're all the same".
Wake the fuck up.
They're not all the same. The people who won yesterday want to take away reproductive rights, roll back civil rights, dump a huge tax burden on working people, strengthen entrenched monopolies, chop down every tree in North America, and send us to war for little reason.
I see the arguments that "I can't give my vote to the opposition because they're slimy and annoying" and I have to laugh. Folks, politics is not about whether you feel beautiful and pure and ideologically correct leaving the booth. Politics is practical. It's about what you can accomplish with that vote, in the real world where we all live. It's not about reading 'zines and drinking wheatgrass juice and being part of a totally ignored nouveau hippie subculture. This stuff has real-world consequences, and not just for you and your painfully correct friends.
So I hope you get what you wanted, anyway. Maybe at the next party you can put on your hemp cap and sweet talk some girl into bed with your tales of how you stood up to the Man and didn't cave in and vote for some compromise candidate because you're keepin' it real. Or maybe you just got to stop off for a latte on your way to work instead of punching a hole in some cardboard.
In any case the rest of us are going to be spending the next two years watching George II and his cronies take away our country. Thanks for nothing.
Wake the fuck up.
They're not all the same. The people who won yesterday want to take away reproductive rights, roll back civil rights, dump a huge tax burden on working people, strengthen entrenched monopolies, chop down every tree in North America, and send us to war for little reason.
I see the arguments that "I can't give my vote to the opposition because they're slimy and annoying" and I have to laugh. Folks, politics is not about whether you feel beautiful and pure and ideologically correct leaving the booth. Politics is practical. It's about what you can accomplish with that vote, in the real world where we all live. It's not about reading 'zines and drinking wheatgrass juice and being part of a totally ignored nouveau hippie subculture. This stuff has real-world consequences, and not just for you and your painfully correct friends.
So I hope you get what you wanted, anyway. Maybe at the next party you can put on your hemp cap and sweet talk some girl into bed with your tales of how you stood up to the Man and didn't cave in and vote for some compromise candidate because you're keepin' it real. Or maybe you just got to stop off for a latte on your way to work instead of punching a hole in some cardboard.
In any case the rest of us are going to be spending the next two years watching George II and his cronies take away our country. Thanks for nothing.
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Third party strategies
Date: 2002-11-06 05:33 pm (UTC)In the states where the Republicans are going to win *anyway*, there's no harm in voting Green. In fact you could even get leftier Democrats to do this as a protest.
Unfortunately the Greens didn't go for it, but it sounds like a great idea. Maybe they should be pressured to think about this a bit more.
btw, I really think vote trading (agreements between voters in different states, managed informally through the internet) should be legal. They existed in the last election but were shut down by court order. Representatives in the government trade votes with their colleagues all the time. Why should the citizenry be forbidden to vote strategically, as long as it produces the government they want?