people who don't vote are not responsible for giving Bush a mandate. the millions of people who voted for Bush are responsible. this is like telling me that I am responsible for killing someone because I didn't wrestle the gun away from their murderer. okay, bad metaphor since voting is not dangerous for me, but the point, I believe, remains valid.
All taxpayers are responsible for giving Bush a mandate. Perhaps not the moral authority you mean, but it's tax receipts that fund even the government's deficit spending. Every dollar you pay into the federal government might go to disaster relief, or vitamins for poor children, or adorable baby shrews, but it just as easily might go to funding a secret prison somewhere in Eastern Europe, or a legal brief by white house council arguing that torture isn't torture, or even the paper on which a signing statement is printed, indicating that your (and mine, sadly) president is enacting a law he means to reinterpret wholesale. Good and bad, it can't be done without you, or me, or hundreds of millions of other complicits.
also, not voting *does* send a message. it sends a message that people are unhappy with their options.
Are you registered to vote? Your first post seems to indicate no. Not being registered to vote and not voting aren't any more the same (to a government agency) than not looking for work and being measurably unemployed. But that's a minor quibble.
Not voting does send a message. But it's the most ambiguous message possible. It could mean you're unhappy with the candidates, or with electoral procedures. But it could as easily mean that you had tickets to a basketball game and thus didn't have time to vote after work. Politicians will always decide what they think you mean based on horribly incomplete information, but by not voting, you're giving less information than most.
I should have a viable fucking option that I'm not too disgusted to vote for.
So get one. It's a bit self-important to think they're going to come looking for you. The myth of major-party politics in the US is that politics should be easy--that there's going to be some perfect candidate who represents enough of what you want and little enough of what you don't to be acceptable, and will also have the money and the machinery to get elected if all you'll do is come out and vote. And maybe it should be, but it certainly isn't, and bipartisan politics across all levels of government work to ensure that it won't be. In Maryland, for instance, you can't even be an election judge without being registered to either party (unless they run short of major-party applicants).
But, me, I have no high horse. I haven't done enough. I haven't given enough time, haven't given enough money, haven't given enough energy to even sound out the people around me to see if maybe possibly they feel the way I do. But, however combative it sounds to borrow the "you're with us or you're against us" trope, in politics I think it rings true to a certain extent, because, again, every taxpayer supports the government whether he wants to or not, and most don't have a choice in it (effective tax evasion being primarily the province of the wealthy). The only real choice citizens have is what sort of government they're going to bankroll. Why a person would choose to cede that is, to me, a tragic mystery. |
