At at event in a hyper-liberal county in N California, a young woman got up to speak. She did something risky. She said,
“I’m not going to vote.”
That got everyone’s attention. She told us that our calling, writing, door-belling her incessantly has solidified her commitment - to not vote. She thinks the personal is not political, that it’s personal and 1-1 connection is how to change the world.
Many others are making the case for one candidate or the other. I’m not doing that. No door-belling or postcards here.
Rather, this is my personal calculation for exercising (our rights), and not just “sitting it out”.
Are you a none-of-the-above non-voter?
In my 20s I didn’t vote. I called it Tweedle dumb and Tweedle dumber, with plenty of evidence that the whole system was irrelevant to what really matters.
I started voting when I realized what was at stake for others, not myself. It wasn’t “lesser of two evils,” or personalities or parties. It was policies that could do so much harm to life that I needed to say my one “No” or “Yes.”
What or who do you want to protect? What is the harm you want to prevent?
I know that politicians promise and fail to deliver, however, the living world and sovereignty are two biggies for me.
The living world
People talk about climate as if it represents nature. No, it’s the part of nature that most affects human settlements and the economy. Civilizations depend on a stable climate. You may never get to see a coral reef, and you may think “what’s it to me that a coral reef elsewhere dies”? But it matters to the fish and plants that depend on coral reefs, and the fish and plants that depend on those fish on up the chain.
If you don’t care about the life beneath the sea other than what you eat, okay, but to me this is crucial. Preservation of the web of life is a legacy project, beyond any of our lifetimes.
I see this as part of ecosystem collapse or ecosystem restoration. Drill baby drill threatens life, not just CO2 in the atmosphere.
War is also an ecosystem issue. Think about the poisoning of land and water through manufacture and deployment of bombs. I know some think that the Republicans are somehow the party of peace and the Democrats warmongers but it’s not that simple. Neither party has the power to stop the weapons industry. Some friends will vote R simplicitically as preventing WWlll. To me, however, isolationism in an interconnected world is no way to prevent war.
The Democrats have a much better track record on ecosystem protection, and that governs my vote.
What the stakes are important to you?
Sovereignty
Sovereignty is about the boundary between personal freedoms and the common good. This is a line debated throughout US history. It’s not just vaccine mandates or school shut downs in a pandemic. I fall somewhere between progressive and libertarian policies in this regard.
Bodily autonomy isn’t just the right to refuse a vaccine. Think of the Tuskegee Syphyllis study on unsuspecting black men. Think about Japanese internment in World War ll. Think about the decimation of indigenous people as settlers claimed their land. Or the spread of novel diseases to that population.
Humans have a right to keep on living. There’s a lot of rhetoric in this election equating sovereignty to vaccination, but it’s a much bigger issue.
Ask any woman who’s been impregnated against her will, or for whom a pregnancy will compromise her right to life. As a woman who grew up in the 1950s, I know how life-threatening it was to criminalize abortion. On this issue, the Democrats win hands down.Sovereignty belongs to people. Real people. Corporations are not people. Bots are not people. AI ain’t people. This is sovereignty front lines and we are not doing well on this point. R-favoring people think D’s are for censorship and R’s are for liberty. But liberty for who? Bots? Corporations? Owners of media companies? I think we need to rein in non-people from running our lives.
Enough for now.
My point is, voting matters not just for what you want but for the rest of life, in the soil, ocean, on land around the whole earth.
That’s my take. I’m not arguing for anything but voting because of what’s at stake not just you, but others.
It can be said that the fate of the world rests on this election. Kamala Harris will carry on with the battle for climate sanity. She will fight for reproductive rights. She will do her best to balance wealth inequality. She will strive to preserve international law and to shore up Ukraine in her battle against a hostile takeover by Putin’s Russia.
And, at the end of either her 1st or 2nd term, she will relinquish power willingly.
She can’t overcome single handedly the vast evil powers of runaway capitalism. No president can.
But she is more than fit, she is smart, kind, and competent.
I will not go into the issues with the other guy. Just watch the news.
I will say though, if you are truly undecided, and that indecision is causing you to cast your eyes on a 3rd party, please do stay home. If you can’t bring yourself to cast a vote for the only sane choice in this election, do us all a favor and stay home.
Much as I care about legislative issues, foreign policy, and fearmongering about immigrants, to me, one threat matters above all, that to the rule of law. We have a candidate who insists he won an election that he in fact lost; who either permitted or encouraged a private army to storm the Capitol to help him retain power; who has promised to pardon the insurrectionists convicted of that crime; has threatened to prosecute anyone who, by word or deed, validated the election results or attempted to hold him accountable; did, as president, direct the Justice Department to go after critics such as James B. Comey, Hillary Clinton, and various newspapers, among others, often costing the defendants millions in legal fees; has contended that the criminal trial that convicted him was unfair and illegal, and that the judge should be prosecuted; has somehow managed to persuade legions of credulous followers that he's a victim who's telling the truth; and has bent elected representatives to swear fealty to his private narrative, including those who huddled in the Capitol the day his insurrectionists attacked.
So I ask those who are refusing to vote "on principle" how that principle measures up to a contempt for the Republic and the law on which it is based.