When news outlets interview people who are not going to vote, they usually talk to people with some kind of ideological reason. But as far as I can tell, most people who don’t vote don’t fail to vote because they have a principle against it. Most of them fail to vote because they’re stressed and inexperienced at navigating bureaucracies and they don’t feel informed and they don’t feel deserving and they don’t have any time.
None of those are problems that you solve by telling people to vote but more angrily than you told them last time.
If you’re a U.S. citizen, you deserve to vote. Democracies don’t actually rely on citizens to be perfectly informed. “Everyone votes, and if you think things are on the right track they vote for the party in power and if they think things are on the wrong track they vote for the party out of power and if they want a divided government they vote for a divided government” is enough to make our system work. But indifference isn’t enough to make our system work.
You can look up your polling place here. If you don’t have a good way to get there, check if Uber or Lyft is offering free rides to the polls in your area.
One of the powerful things democracy can do is aggregate everyone’s gut. You probably have a gut feeling about whether the last two years have made this a society you are more proud of, or a society you are less proud of. Even if the only thing you feel competent to evaluate is that, you are competent to evaluate that, and that matters.
A lot of things are awful right now. But they’ve been worse. We clawed our way here from there, and we’ll keep working on it.
If you don’t see how you’ll be logistically able to vote, feel free to message me, I can try to break it down into smaller problems and look things up for you.
Me, waking you up at two am: hey, do you ever think about how we live in a culture of rejecting our local “wild places” in favor of fetishizing and romanticizing the distant and different?
There’s this overwhelming rhetoric we’re fed that the only nature worth protecting is Grand and Huge and most of all Somewhere Else.
Nobody thinks about the wetland behind their local Walmart that is in Desperate need of protection, or the little remnant prairie in a cemetery, because they’re too focused on the abstract and often flawed concept of “wilderness” somewhere else.
There is nothing wrong with wanting to travel to see something new and unique, but the way I hear people talk about our own backyard, the way the last remnants of what we have here are ignored or outright rejected, breaks my heart.
My professor has spent his entire career in the Midwest trying to protect wetlands from housing developments and new superstores, but he almost always loses, not just because the developers have money, but the community doesn’t care enough to do anything about it.
Afterall, what’s a few old oak and birch trees in a little puddle of a swamp compared to miles of marsh in Scandinavia? What’s a grassy hill to a distant mountain range?
Well, to the duck, to the heron, to the bluebird, and to precious few people, I’d say it’s Everything.
I love to travel myself, and I know people probably don’t know that when they say “why is our wildlife/plant life etc. so lame” that they’re contributing to an attitude of rejecting what unique beauty we do have,
But
I hope one day people can see the wonder nearby and fight to protect it. I hope there’s something left to protect.
Anyway…..where do u keep your cups I want some water.
I feels so strongly about this. I live in California which has both massive development and some of the most beautiful natural spaces imagineable. And like people don’t realize that the ho-hum natural spaces in their city are often contiguous with natural spaces that host important biodiversity which are then connected to…
Death Valley.
Yosemite.
The eastern Sierras.
The central coast.
The Redwoods.
Anza-Borrego.
The Antelope Valley poppy preserve.
Lake Tahoe.
Joshua Tree.
Literally, people have thrown away wetlands that support biodiversity because it’s coastal property that brings in big money and yet…. that biodiversity is critical to the overall health of our wildlands. Like? Really?
And don’t even get me started on the desert. Everyone heads out to Anza-Borrego during wildflower season, but then some assholes go out and wreck desert pupfish habitat because it was a fun thing to do when they were drunk. I’ve seen photos of Joshua Trees ripped out of the ground because they were in an inconvenient place. And the Poppy Preserve? We literally had to set aside land for seasonal wildflowers or it would have been developed over, destroying a diverse environment that’s only beautiful for a few weeks of the year (but is healthy and supports wildlife all year long).
Anyway… [waves arms about my TED talk so this sounds remotely like kids these days]
you know what’s wild is that all these crazy standards we hold ourselves to are things that we don’t even value in another person? like i’ve never been like “wow I love that this friend of mine is too proud to ask for help and never complains about their feelings” or “my favorite quality about this friend is that they get straight A’s and never get overwhelmed and has never told me about a problem” or “i love that this friend has never been wrong about anything or slipped up and said something embarrassing once in their life” and yet here we are, pushing ourselves past our limits for and beating ourselves up over slipups of things that our friends probably wouldn’t even rank in the top 50 reasons they like us
Thoughtfulfangirling 