Your vote isn't going to change the national election. What it may do, though, is associate you or separate you from the profound criminality that has just now decided to send 1.3 billion dollars to, in part, wage biological warfare against harmless poor people in a foreign country, while keeping hundreds of thousands of other harmless poor people in prisons at home. They say that he who sups with the Devil should take a long spoon; I don't know what you can do about voting for the Devil. A ten-foot-pole won't fit in the voting booth.
Gordon Fitch
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Gordon,
I expected to hear some noise for suggesting to myself that I actually vote and vote for the democrats, so that I had proper adversaries to combat. I would much rather argue with Brad, Nathan, and others here or in the streets on some issue that counts, than pick through the tide pool inhabitants from the other side. Those are the choices. Nader and others are not options---and I don't particularly trust Nader anyway.
(For a tide pool field guide see the bibliography of Dances with Devils. I was just re-formatting it, pasting the sections together and looking through the lists.)
In any case, the post was an experiment in how to construct an argument that did not depend on moral rectitude. If you consider voting not as a gesture of support for a policy agenda, but as a choice of enemies to combat, then that acknowledges it is a choice of devils in advance.
By the way I am criminal, but one who has managed to avoid prosecution. I commit crimes every hour of every working day. Hopefully I am responsible for disposing unknown hundreds of thousands of dollars in federal, state and private healthcare insurance fraud, waste and abuse.
Did you ever read `The Stranger'? In case you didn't, the hero commits two morally repugnant acts, one lesser, one greater. He falls asleep at his mother's funeral, and he shoots an Algerian on the beach, emptying his gun in the man. His excuse for murder was that the sun got in his eyes. The prosecution uses the first act to prove the callousness of the second in order to extract the death penalty. Meursault is convicted and waits to be executed for having no moral conscience or human feeling. He is estranged from a society based on the highest of moral principles, and to prove it, the society intends to kill him.
Do you want to explain how not voting or voting for a candidate certain to lose upholds a moral principle, or how that might advance your positions?
Chuck Grimes