I'm not registered to vote here, because, while we may have lived here long enough. We'd have to have our drivers licenses changed, and we haven't yet.
Yeah, I know it's important to vote. I do. I get to feeling really bad about women's suffrage when I don't vote, because a hell of a lot of women worked really hard so I could, but I don't. I know it's the one thing that people in this country can do, and right now the people out voting are the rich white guys, so of course they're going to get what they want done.
But, just about everyone I've talked to today has said something along the lines that they're just "not voting for the other guy". That's STILL going about it the wrong way. In some cases, I would consider it more dangerous because you're busy sending the wrong message to Washington. This isn't a Shakespeare play where you find out before it's too late that you've fallen in love with your long lost brother. In real life, you won't know he's your brother until you're expecting, and you meet up with your mother, who mentions one day that, yes, you were a twin, didn't you know? And then you realise you've created a monster.
Ummm, anyway, the principle of the thing (voting for someone who you only guess stands for the same things you do) suggests to me that people probably don't know a damn thing about who they're voting for. If we took the party titles off the ballot, people would go ape-shit because they wouldn't know who they were supposed to vote for. That is truly pointless. There are still pro-choice Republicans and right to life Democrats out there (see Republicans for Choice and Democrats for Life in America respectively). Voting for the three letters before a guy's name is not the same thing as voting for someone who supports the same issues you support.
If I had a better opportunity to find out all I could about the people running, and learn what they actually believe, and find someone I could agree with, I would vote. It's my own fault for expecting the giant douche and the turd sandwich to tell me more than what a jerk the other guy is, but that's largely what I hear. I don't hear the things they're going to try to do, only things that back up this backwards voting concept, "vote for me because you really can't stand the other guy".
The problem with this is that the people who care about this sort of thing already know for whom they're voting. Negative campaigning does not work well. If you want to sell Pepsi, you don't do it by bashing Coke. No one who drinks Coke is going to say to themselves, "well, gee, those Pepsi people know what they're talking about, Coke sucks, I'll drink Pepsi now." And the people who drink RC are going to look at the Pepsi people and wonder why they think they're better than the Coke people, and continue to drink their RC, and maybe even try Coke, just to see whether the Pepsi people were right. That�s what candidates are doing, and in doing so they're campaigning for the people who are already going to vote for them.
In that case, why do candidates go out of their way year after year to get the same people to vote for them who already will? Because it's safe, never mind whether it's the right thing, or the smart thing, or the effective thing to do. It's easier to put money into a dead cert. But, if someone's not going to take a risk for their campaign, where it's only money, why are they going to start once they're in office, when it becomes lives of citizens?
This is not a confidence instilling system.
Like I've said before about Nora and Torvold: for things to really happen in this country, both Nora and Torvold would have to be so changed that they could really have a marriage, a relationship. Nora can't stay in the house and let Torvold treat her like a child and call it a marriage. It's not a real marriage, it's not working together to accomplish anything. Torvold's just letting Nora play at having control. Nora has to wake up and realise this is all a sham, and she has to do something about it.
I think I'll suggest that political metaphor to the guy who directed The Crucible here... Why call it Nazi's when it's really just two idiots married to each other without knowing what's involved in the process?
Reading all that back, I think it would be a lot easier for me to vote if I didn't know so much about government. Curse you, Mr. Mahler, for actually teaching us in class, not just teaching the AP test. Of course, he would tell me it's still no excuse: I should do my own research and find someone to agree with and support them.
I guess we'll talk next year.