This is a short essay (or Chautauqua, to emulate Robert M. Pirsig) on why I not only don’t vote, but believe that being involved in politics, and by extension voting, is antithetical to living a happy life. I will address some of the most common points raised in support of voting, but first, I want to talk to you a little bit about the way I see things. I need some direct quotes to support my arguments in this essay, so bear with me as I develop it please. I will do my duty! Haha, duty!
I’d like to start by having you think about how nice other human beings can be. There are those times when we are with another person and just being together with them is so nice that you can go do boring stuff together and it’s actually fun. I love those times. One of my favorite things to do is meet other people and talk to them. I do it almost everywhere I go.
One of the many things that makes humans so great is that they’re so complicated and fragile and unique. Even a cursory glance at the human body fills me with wonder at all those tubes and fluids and muscles hoarking and glorping away inside each of us. We’re each incredible, and each imperfect, and those imperfections are what make us so amazing.
Sometimes we behave selfishly. Just tonight I had a dinner date with a friend to apologize to him for acting like a dick. I think things are smoothed over now, which is great, but that doesn’t erase the fact that I did act like a dick. It was dumb of me. Maybe you could say it was human of me, but I should know better. Lesson learned.
Unfortunately, there are dick moves out there like lightening strikes on the landscape. It’s not sad anymore than the fact that the wind blows is sad. It’s sad if the wind blows your beer over, but that’s because your beer got spilled, not because the wind blew. People are fallible and scared and selfish sometimes. You could call that being human.
I think that people are more prone to be dicks when they are being dicks to people who are far away from them. It’s not that hard to be a dick to the nameless, faceless member of a mass, but hopefully it’s at least a little harder to march up to an old lady and kick her in the shin. Unless she mouthed off, that is.
And so here we are, hoarking and glorping away, kissing and shouting and fucking and hugging and lying and comforting and stealing off into the night. That’s humanity for you, and that’s exactly the same humans who construct our government. Every single one of them wants to kiss and grow rich and provide for their kids and have powerful friends, and doing those things in politics requires compromise. Politics are compromise.
Have you ever watched political TV ads? They all include all sorts of facts about who voted against what that is supposedly good, and who voted for what that is supposedly bad, but these statistics are meaningless because they are devoid of context. What else was in those bills that also got voted for or against? Hell if I know. I’m trying to live a happy life here. I think we can agree that to be a truly informed voter would be a full time job. Some people are that dedicated to it. I respect their dedication.
I believe that there is a biorhythm to government. I think that governments are born lax and progress toward the strict until they are ever absorbed by a greater government or overthrown from within. I got much of this thought from 1984 by George Orwell. If you haven’t read it already, please do. You can see this at work in our lives right now. We are getting less “free” with every passing day.
It is in the government’s best interest that this should be so. They want more power and more money. That’s a human trait too. I want more power and more money because I want to live in a nice house and be warm and dry and fed all year, and I want to have a pretty wife and well-fed well-educated kids. You can’t blame the government for it, they’re just humans!
So how to get more money from us? Well, one good way seems to be fear. Every time I turn on a news program, it sounds to me like a big list of who is dead. They go on and on about it for twenty minutes, and then do a twenty second spot about a dog that rescued a kid from a storm drain, or something like that. It’s hard for me to watch the news.
I’m not saying, mind you, that the news media is the government. That would be a conspiracy theory and I am not a conspiracy theorist. I don’t think there is anything particularly nefarious going on, I just think that humans are generally motivated to gain power and wealth for themselves and their families.
Actually I think that the news media list dead people all the time because that’s what news watchers want to see. If people did not watch news shows about dead people, there would not be any on.
Why is this so? Well, because death is the great unknown. The big thing to fear. It is the opposite of humanity, and the terminus of human-ness. So, we’re fascinated with it. So much so that we generate a myriad of stories and theories and mythologies about it. That is so human of us!
So, we have politicians who want to grow their wealth and power, in order to do which they need to get elected, and in order to do that they need to be popular and easily recognizable, and in order to do that they need to be on TV, so they say scary stuff in the name of “safety”, and we watch it. This is not happiness to me. I don’t want to be involved with it, so I’m not.
I would like to know how many laws are passed every year vs how many repealed. I will find that out and include it here.
But we all know that if you don’t vote, you have no right to complain, right? Well, I think that’s a bullshit argument. I am allowed to complain to as many people as I can convince to listen. That’s the invisible hand at work for you. If you want to complain, don’t bother voting, just be interesting about it. I do this by throwing in fart jokes and swear words. Try it!
I actually don’t promote or condone complaining, because I don’t think it’s constructive necessarily, but I do think that anyone should be allowed to say anything. If what they’re saying is compelling, people will listen. If it’s not, they won’t.
Not choosing is a choice. That’s another thing that annoys me about politics. It’s set up to be Reds vs Blues. You are one or the other. Some of you real wackos out there are greens or yellows, but hey, we all know you might as well be reds or blues because a vote for green is a vote away from blue, and thus for red, and a vote for yellow is a vote away from red, and thus for blue!
I don’t believe that two choices are enough. I think that a really good system would be one where it’s possible to have a dozen choices that are all elected or not based on their individual merits. I have no idea how to design a system like that, but it seems like a free market economy type election system like that would be preferable to the one we have now.
I don’t, however, think that we’ll get there. Have you ever read any Naom Chomsky, or checked him out at all? He’s a pretty smart dude. He’s one of those guys who actually tries to play the game by the game’s rules, and by that I mean he’s really informed on what’s going on. I think I heard he reads twelve papers a day. I will check to see if that’s right. Anyway, he’s up on world affairs.
In fact he’s so up on world affairs that he can put all the pieces together for you globally. So if you ask him a question he’s able to give you a coherent answer about why each government did what and how the other governments reacted. It sounds crazy, but most of the reports you hear are like listening to Suzy talk about why she and Brad broke up, but only from Suzy’s perspective. Mr Chomsky can tell you Brad’s side of the story too. He’s very smart. Look him up sometime.
I bring him up because he talks about the third choice. I’ve heard him use the Vietnam war as an example. As I recall, he said that there was one group of people saying on the one hand that we should stay in Vietnam and finish the job, and another group saying that we should pull out now, but no one on TV was saying “What the hell are we doing there anyway?”. I need to get the exact quote here, but that’s the gist as I recall.
Also he’s been asked why he doesn’t appear in the American media much, and his answer is because he has that third opinion and it doesn’t make for a good clip because everything he says requires an explanation that the networks don’t have time for him to give. So, he’s not on TV. I will find the exact quote about this too.
So, not voting is that third choice. It’s the one I’m making!
My friend Sabrina says “But if smart people don’t vote, bad things happen”. Well, smart people do vote, and bad things do happen. Look, I think people are smart and powerful. I do not think that humans are dummies, they’re just busier growing their personal wealth and power and feeding their kids and going to work than they are thinking about politics. But they feel obligated to vote, or they feel it’s their civic duty, so they do. This has not stopped bad things from happening, and it won’t stop bad things from happening no matter how many smart people vote. That sucks!
I say this a lot: “Lions eat lambs”. Lambs are cute and cuddly and made of meat. Lions are made of meat too, but they are strong, so they eat lambs. Decry it all you like, bemoan it if you must, but the continuation of the organism known as Lion requires the resources contained in Lamb to survive. That’s just life for you.
Governments are the same way. I think you can consider America to be a lion, because we’re big and we have big teeth. Whereas a country like Iraq is a lamb which is made of tasty delicious oily meat. I think you see where I am going here. It’s ugly, but that’s the reality of the world. We are a lion and we need that lamb because we drive a lot of cars and heat our homes and so on and so forth.
I doubt that anyone seriously believes in their heart of hearts that the middle east military action on the part of the US-led coalition is anything but a bid for oil any more than the cookie monster’s sidling to the kitchen is just to make sure the cookie jar is okay. Let’s be honest here, folks. We need that oil, and they have it, and they’re being pricks about giving it to us because they want a bunch of money for it.
Can you believe those guys? They want us to pay them for their stuff so they can feed their families and marry pretty women and be warm and dry. Those bastards. That’s what we do!
I don’t think that this sort of behavior will ever change. Governments are the way they are because they are run by and constructed of humans. Sometimes kids shove other kids for their pudding. Sometimes adults shoot each other over boyfriends or girlfriends. Sometimes groups of people brawl over neighborhoods. Sometimes governments take over other governments. It’s ugly, but it’s human. Lions eat lambs.
My friend Doug says “Well doesn’t that make you feel like there’s no point? You can never change anything, so why try?”
No, it doesn’t. Like I said, I think humans are smart and I think humans are powerful, but we should spend our time changing things that we can change. There are plenty of things you can do in your own neighborhood to better it. I don’t even have to list any, I bet you can think of some. Every time you leave your house, you change the world. It’s the butterfly effect. I just don’t think you can change people, and governments are made of them.
I’d rather try to help some people close to me, because it feels like something that I can actually accomplish. Do it with me!
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