Monologue of a Young Voter

Tuesday was election day.   According to history, about 40% of the U.S. voting population voted.  60% didn't vote.  Not even a little bit.

In California 7 million people voted.   40 million people live in the state.

Facts.

Here are my thoughts:

This was the first time I got involved in the elections, even though it still wasn't much.  Don't get me wrong, I've voted since I turned 18.  In 2006, I voted for Ned Lamont in Connecticut when he was the hopeful progressive outsider challenging Joe Lieberman.  In 2008, I triumphantly voted for Obama in the primaries (and then messed up getting my absentee ballot for the general election because I was out of the country.)

But this time, I found a way to be more inspired because I'd gone to a talk by Billy Wimsatt -- the writer and organizer who gets himself and others fired up about voting and elections in way that few people can.

Taking his advice, I made a local progressive youth voter guide that I emailed to friends and family. (Of course hella last minute.  Blah.  The goal is for it to be collaborative and finished at least a little bit ahead of time so that it can be distributed all over the place... Next time!)  I researched the issues and made my little cheat sheet.  It was very empowering.

Elections are a token version of democracy, but at least they're some version of democracy, right?  If only we were able to the leverage this little opportunity to cast a ballot into something that actually began to resemble real public, participatory democracy.

I'm feeling that the whole culture around voting is wrong.  I was driving to work in the middle of the day on Tuesday feeling all pumped about how citizens across the nation were casting ballots.  But I looked around and nothing reflected that since of epicness inside me.  Just billboards for the same old ads.  The same old cars driving down the highway.  I kept changing the radio dial, but barely anyone was talking about the elections, let alone GETTING OUT THE VOTE!

It could be the fun, festive, jovial public ritual, but instead it's this private, solemn, "civic duty."  WTF?

You go to the polls before or after work.  You wait through the bureaucracy.  You vote and it's completely, super, uber private.  The layout of the ballot mixed with fluorescent lighting makes you feel dumb and gives you headaches.  You feel kinda sick voting for candidates just cause they're less evil.  This is insulting to your dignity.  You feel good voting for a proposition you really support.  You feel really effing confused about everything else.  Then you cast it into the machine and get on with the rest of your day.  Perhaps a little small talk is thrown in.

It is not empowering!

We don't have a culture of democracy, we have a culture of bureaucracy!  (Wow...haha...maybe I should be a speech writer.)

Why aren't we all having dances and block parties in the street, passing out tons of DIY voter guides, filling out ballots together, wearing t-shirts of who we're voting for, hollering out your support for Kamala Harris inside the polling place while shading in the bubble next to her name?

Think of it as a SF Giants game!  Or parade! (If only politicians were as appreciative of their base as the Giant's players are of theirs.)

As I was driving home, a lot more radio stations we're analyzing the election results.  But that's just the problem.  The media outlets LOVE the spectacle of covering election results, but where were they the day of?  Were they encouraging and empowering people to actually go out and vote? In the weeks leading up to it, were they actually helping voters to understand who and what we were voting on?  (The newspapers do their part, but not the media as a whole.)

Now the obvious response is that voting is not worth it because there's nothing to get excited about. That its a two party dictatorship.  "We have other things on our plate. Voting offers me nothing."  There is truth in this for sure, for sure.  Elections are still superficial in the bigger picture.  (Read some deep ish - Adrienne Maree Brown's wisdom about election day - here.)  But hey.

Democrats are better.  Obama has actually accomplished quite a bit.  Wonder what the ef Obama has done so far?  Check out the website: whatthefuckhasobamadonesofar.com.  He passed student loan reform, healthcare reform, financial regulation, de-escalated the Iraq War, and prevented a worse economy.  (Though of course the adequacy of all are arguable...and he has escalated the Afghanistan war, robot drone killings, deportations...)

But building a progressive movement is an incremental thing.  A movement that gets seriously organized can pressure people like Obama and the democrats.  A progressive movement has no chance of pressuring right-wingers.

Or if you're totally fed up with the Democrats, why not organize folks in the 60% of non-voters to vote for the Green Party?

Right now, we do not have a democratic voting culture.  People have to work on election day.  People don't know where their polling place is for their precinct.  They are not allowed to vote at a place that is close to their work but far from their home.  The ballots don't make sense.  The lines are too long.  The polling places are understaffed.  There is a ton of documented voter suppression - such as intentionally misleading voters about where they can vote.  Tons of people are barred from voting, most commonly for felony convictions.  The media tends to only confuse us more.  Third parties are legally barred from debates.  In most states, people have to register to vote weeks before the election, when it usually off the public radar.

But we can do our small parts to change that.  We can make voter guides with friends and pass them out far and wide.  We can also organize support for a constitutional amendment guaranteeing the right to vote?  (It seems obvious, but is in fact not reality.)  Or universal, automatic voter registration for anyone who turns 18?  Or a day off work?

Until then I'll be following Billy Wimsatt's and others' documentation of how our generation is the most progressive since 1972.  And Jeff Chang's analysis (which I wrote about before) about the coming political battles between majority white baby boomers and a majority POC generation of young people growing into adulthood.

Peace!

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Here are Billy Wimsatt's reason's for getting involved in electoral politics in his new book, Please Don't Bomb the Suburbs, which I highly recommend to anyone who loves social justice, honesty, organizing, and movement building:

"Top eight reasons for people who hate politics to love elections:

1) Bridge barriers: Elections force us to work together across our barriers: race, class, issues, ideology.  Women, gays, environmentalists, people of color, students, labor--we are all getting screwed by the same folks.  Elections are a very concrete way to bring us all together.

2) Talk to regular people: Elections necessitate us to get out of activist bubbles and communicate with everyday people who don't agree with us.  This can only be a good thing,

3) Include the whole country: Elections force us to focus on the entire county, especially suburban area and Middle America, not just cities and the coasts.  The movement desperately needs to become more inclusive.

4) Data: Elections make us get serious about data.  We claim to represent 'the people.' But who are these people?  Maybe they show up up at a rally.  But do we have their phone numbers? Can we contact them? No.

5) Think big: Elections encourage us to think large-scale.  They force us how to build majorities and win.

6) Money...and money: Elections open up a whole new stream of money for community-based work.  Two streams, actually -- the money it takes to win elections, and the much bigger stream controlling government budgets and what our tax dollars should be spent on.

7) Ease: On top of all of that, elections are an easy thing to organize around.  Unlike most other movement activities, the media actually wants to cover you.  Regular people are more invested in what you are talking about, and think you are addressing something practical, not some pie-in-the-sky fantasy. There are very clear deadlines, and very clear results.  Compared to "saving the planet" or "fighting racism," elections are satisfying, practical, and simple.  That makes it easy to get more people involved.

8) Winning and losing: Oh yeah. That. Winners get to hire and empower a bunch of people who share their values. And they get to vote on things that affect us all.