I know that November is five months away, so this is a little early, but the intensity to which U.S. adults pressure others to vote, even if they’re vaguely familiar with how corrupt the system is, utterly baffles me.
When we explain our abstinence, voters almost never respond with anything like ‘Yeah, I can understand. You do you.’ Normally it’s a generic ‘fuck you’ reply or pathetic begging. ‘Yeah, I know that the two candidates with any chance of winning are very similar and they might break their promises anyway because the material conditions have far more influence on their decisions… but still this guy might end up being 0.1% less awful than the other guy so please, please, PLEASE VOTE PRETTY PLEEEEEEEASE!!!’
What I hate most of all, though, is how people tear each other apart over these glorified public opinion polls, blaming everybody but the upper‐class scum who imposed this system on us in the first place. It’s normal for voters to chastise others for selecting a minor candidate because that’s a ‘wasted’ vote, and both they and the abstainers get the blame for another awful candidate winning, because that’s easier than blaming the upper classes. Ugh. That concludes my rant.
I used to tell my friends to vote. I would never tell them who to vote for, and I wouldn’t harangue them. Basically, I would say that voting is useless at worst, and might move some needle at best, so why not just do it? I kind of still feel the same way, but I also am so disgusted with this bullshit right now, that I’m not telling anyone to vote. I actually apologized to a friend recently, for all the times I argued with him about voting.