I know some dozen liberal-leaning people, mostly women, who either don’t plan to vote in this election or plan to vote third party.
Why? They are post-structuralists who hate “the system” and think it’s beyond repair. Or they are socialists and couldn’t get Bernie. Or they are feminists who think Biden’s too handsy. Or they are Marxists who think the deck is stacked against them anyway. Or they are revolutionaries (who conveniently aren’t ready to start any revolutions). Or they are purists who are holding out for the bald Black lesbian disabled Satanist candidate who’ll really shake things up. Or they are radicals. Or they are nihilists. Or they are anarchists. They can’t bring themselves to vote for less than the perfect society that exists in their minds, and yet they aren’t doing the things that need to be done to bring about that perfect society.
If you want to turn a ship around, you can’t just fantasize about what it looks like when it’s pointed in the other direction. You can’t just will it to point in the other direction. You have to turn the wheel. And the wheel turns frustratingly slow and it’s hard work and it will give you a cramp in your arm. But turning the wheel is nonetheless the way to get the job done.
If you live in a country where women vote, where girls attend school, where female toddlers’ feet aren’t crushed or genitals removed to make them “marriageable,” where your daughter isn’t betrothed to her uncle at the age of ten, where women don’t have to produce a bloody sheet on their wedding night to keep from getting stoned to death, where you won’t be slain in an “honor killing” for refusing a date–you need to thank the people who came before you and turned the wheel. The work was tedious and thankless and they got called names and were beaten and arrested and killed. Sometimes they didn’t even have the freedom to assemble, much less access to the press to disseminate articulate opinion pieces or an audience applauding their efforts on social media.
If you’re worried that Roe v Wade is about to be overturned, you need to thank the people who won reproductive rights in 1973, and who fought again and again against the assaults upon them in the intervening years. If you’re upset about bias in the press, you need to recognize the people who envisioned and fought for and implemented (if imperfectly) the largely free press that informs your standard. If you’re critiquing or complaining about any aspect of your society or government at all it’s because you enjoy free speech which was brought to you by the people who bothered to draft and fight for and sign article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Perhaps you don’t like the constitution or the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Perhaps you think there’s a better way to effect the society you envision. But that, too, will take money and time and tedious administrative work. Get to it.
This shouldn’t be controversial, but people have to do things before the things get done. THINGS DON’T DO THEMSELVES. God is not the cause. Magic is not the cause. Good intentions are not the cause.
“Your labor is your contribution to the miracle.” – Elizabeth Gilbert
If you value your ideological purity, if you enjoy accolades on social media for your ideas, if you prefer to think than to act, congratulations! You share these traits with everyone else who’s complicit in that status quo you hate. You join the ranks of the oppressor class who also don’t want–not badly enough–to effect change. After all, they benefit from keeping things the way they are. Donald Trump can count on conservatives, religious fundamentalists, corrupt police, white collar criminals, racists, misogynists, and you. Note, too, that all of you enjoy a great deal of privilege when you can fold your arms and opine and refuse to act instead of being too busy fighting for your life–as many, many people in the world are–to even evaluate what needs to change.
The Establishment can’t feel your dissent. The Establishment doesn’t care if you, like so many other red-blooded ‘Mericans, love and respect and approve of Donald Trump’s reign of destruction, or if you’re simply too busy thinking revolutionary thoughts to challenge it. The result’s the same.