So, here's a bet. If a significant number on Lbo don't vote, Bush will win, and if Lbo gets off its collective butt and gets down to the polls, then Gore will win, barely.
This isn't because Lbo will throw the election, but because it collective represents some million or so others who are occasionally wondering the same things and trying to figure out if it matters, if they should bother, maybe Nader, maybe not, blah, blah, blah.
Vote. If it makes no difference, then vote anyway. See, I think the real reason Lbo doesn't vote is because most live in communities where they are completely isolated from the local political collective mass. In other words most live in places where their views are so against the grain that they have no concrete experience with living in a political community. I don't mean having political friends, I mean complete strangers on the street who compose that community.
Berkeley is a mess, hypocritical beyond belief, bored, apathetic, commercial, dead, and all the rest, but it is also so politicized that almost every stupid neighborhood of the city represents some piece of the political spectrum on some bizarre issue or other. I am sure somewhere in the counsel minutes there are resolutions on Fiji, Ireland, South Africa, Indonesia, India, Afghanistan, Mexico, even Oregon, Mississippi, whales, wheelchairs, and god only knows were or what else. Voting locally here makes a difference, and has made a difference, and that's why we've stayed to the general left of democrats for about thirty years. Sure I'd rather we were to the Left of Marx, but shit that's just my idealism showing.
So, every year I go over to the old Christian Science Church around the corner on southside and see or used to see the same little old ladies running the store, talking, handing out the voting stubs. There used to be one republican stall and about six democrat stalls. The republican stall was just for show. Its sits off to one side and is a little awkward to get to. In eighteen years I have never seen anyone go there. It probably still has the ballot insert key for the first Reagan administration for all I know.
Also, just make the same arguments as before. Vote for whoever you want to fight against. Vote because a silent majority is anybody's majority. That's the magic of silence. It is unknown and unknowable. Vote for local issues that might actually count, and while your there, vote for the damn president. Certainly vote for congress.
There, my civic duty is over. I should have gotten off my ass and gone to LA this week. Whenever I used to go back it was always a game to go find some neighborhood I used live in and see if it even existed anymore. I don't mean changed, I mean if it existed at all. Whole swaths used to get destroyed and re-done on a ten year cycle, like changing cars or something. Anybody know what's on the corner of Hoover and Figeroa or Lucus and Beverley. Well, even if it was just ugly old LA, it got to me after awhile. Everything erased as if it never were.
Chuck Grimes