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scarletwoman

scarletwoman's Journal
scarletwoman's Journal
March 22, 2014

I vote. I've voted in every election since 1970. Midterms, presidential elections, doesn't matter.

I've never not voted for 44 years, ever since I was old enough to vote. (They lowered the voting age too late for me to able to vote in 1968)

I don't vote based on hoping I'll get what I want. I vote because because I want to be counted. I vote because I want those who end up running things - for good or for ill - to know that I'm one of the people watching and paying attention.

This notion that it's a matter of principle to only vote when there's someone running who meets your personal criteria for a "true liberal" or a "true progressive" is a massive missing of the heart of the matter.

You can't always get what you want. What you CAN do is demonstrate that, in spite of everything, you are insisting that you be counted as an active participant in the exercise of our collective democratic right to vote.

As Emma Goldman said (paraphrasing here), If voting really changed things it would be made illegal. I sadly agree - but I'll still vote because I want TPTB to know that I'm out here watching what they do.

I vote because I want to be counted, nothing more.

sw



March 16, 2014

The problem with midterm elections for Democrats:

The right wing whips its voters into a frenzy, and those voters show up because they *know* they are at war. And it's a war they are single-mindedly determined to win.

There is no equivalent frenzy among voters who might support Democrats because they don't feel called to win a war. They don't even get that there IS a war. Right wing framing of issues is so all-pervasive that it's become normalized. And, thanks to the Corporate media, there are essentially no voices heard who might challenge it.

The big national elections every four years when the presidency is being contested gets peoples' attention because it's THE American Idol contest of American politics. The midterms, not so much. Because only one side considers itself at war, only one side thinks that it's in a life or death struggle for control - and those are the folks who reliably show up.

I know that most of us here on DU also understand that we too are at war, but that's just not the case with most of the American electorate, who are more or less disengaged and have no sense of the bigger picture.

I have no idea what it will take for our side to awaken the same sense of urgency in ordinary disengaged voters that the right wing does with their supporters. The right wing accomplishes this through constant lies and by appealing to the base instincts and irrationality of those who have no capacity for critical thinking. It's no great feat to gin up that sort of angry mob out of such material.

The question, it seems to me, is how do we, who value truth, rationality and independent thinking, gin up our own angry mob, ready to go to war? Is there a way to do this?

Profile Information

Gender: Female
Hometown: Minnesota
Current location: up north
Member since: 2001
Number of posts: 31,893

About scarletwoman

I'm an old white woman, born in November, 1949. My parents lived through the Depression and WWII (my dad's a veteran). I've witnessed a lot of history firsthand, plus I carry the stories handed down to me by my parents, aunts and uncles from their generation, and my grandparents from their generation. Basically, my memory is a depository for most of the 20th century of U.S. history, plus the 2 decades (so far) of the 21st century. //////Important quote: Milos Forman (film director, b. 1932, d. 2018) - "I hear the word "socialist" being tossed around by the likes of Rick Perry, Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum, Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh and others. President Barack Obama, they warn, is a socialist. The critics cry, "Obamacare is socialism!" They falsely equate Western European-style socialism, and its government provision of social insurance and health care, with Marxist-Leninist totalitarianism. It offends me, and cheapens the experience of millions who lived, and continue to live, under brutal forms of socialism." (He lived in Czechoslovakia under Communism before emigrating to the U.S.A.)
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