> > While the purpose may be a good one, you are showing more than a bit of arrogance when you
> > assume the basis of why people don't vote. Keep up the attitude and you're more than half way to
> > being ignored before you start.
> >
>
> Well said. I don't vote, mainly because I just don't care anymore. Is that arrogant and self-
> centered?
Well said indeed. I spoke hastily and without enough thought and so what came out was overly
critical and unnececssarily harsh. You are absolutely right, I should be more compassionate and
understanding. Allow me to attempt to express myself better here. Although, really I shouldn't've
said anything at all, since my expression comes off as dangerously partisan.
.
I think, to avoid being hypocritical I should note that though I'm 23 years old, I just registered
to vote for the first time this month. I do not spare myself my critique.
It's not enough to say, "I don't care" and be done with it. It's important to understand why we
don't care. From my own experience and from talking to many other non-voters who also "didn't care"
I've learned that very few, if any of us actually don't care. In fact, the impetus for our response
is, ironically, that we *do* care, or we did at one time. But caring was hard, it hurt.
We are so deeply immersed in a culture of uncaring, so overwhelmed with the woes of the world and so
intimately connected to the systems that propogate them that caring turns, very easily into
hopelessness. The systems that surround us seem so huge, unquenchable and untouchable that we can
almost be forgiven for thinking that there is nothing we can do about it. That whether we vote or
not, buy clothes made in sweat-shops or not, or lie in bed until we rot it will make no difference.
It's easy to think of children in sweatshops in Asia or starving people in Africa as the victems of
this global Empire, but realizing that just as much as they, we are the casualties of Empire. We are
being killed in our souls while our bodies lie in luxery.
Whatever the case, if we're without hope or if hope there be, we owe it, to ourselves and to the
whole world, to struggle against the wooley chains of dispair. We owe it to those that have come
before us and those that will follow to leave this world a place better than we found it. Our lives
belong not solely to ourselves, but to the whole of Humanity.
"Do not go gentle into that good night, Old age should burn and rave at close of day; Rage, rage
against the dying of the light.
"Though wise men at their end know dark is right, Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.
"Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
"Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight, And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way, Do
not go gentle into that good night.
"Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
"And you, my father, there on the sad height, Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light. "
-- Dylan Thomas
