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[rm]

http://www.livejournal.com/users/koimistress/23506.html

I don't agree with all of it, but it is extremely well-written, emotionally present and important reading. At nearly fifty, the writer has decided to vote for the first time.

Comments

Voting

[keith418.livejournal.com]

I wonder if she wonders whether her years of inactivity have created, in a small way, the current state of crisis? Is that fair? I confess, I find such recent awakenings to be more irksome than something to be celebrated.

She writes:

People would say, "If you don't vote, you lose the right to gripe about it later!" Please. I'm an American, a writer, and a fannish person. We never lose the right to gripe.

This, I think, reveals a level of cluelessness that annoys me about many in the "fan" community. I don't know whether to feel anger at the stupidity or fear when the stupidity becomes coherent.

This is a line, in an article online, that addresses some of what I think the larger implications of her post are:

"...if you want to do politics, then do politics. You can’t do culture and call it politics." Heath notes with frustration the phenomenon of the alienated voter during the last federal election. Young people aren’t voting, and much of this is due to counterculture’s discouragement of political participation: if you vote, you’ve bought into the system. People say, ‘Oh — no political party really speaks to me.’ Whoever said a political party was supposed to speak to you personally? It’s not the job of the Liberal Party, for example, to make you happy. It’s the job of the Liberal Party to try and make nearly 40 million people happy. Democracy is about compromise, and if you don’t like that, then you really, fundamentally, have to ask yourself whether you like democracy.”

- from here.

It's one thing when kids don't get this, but when you're 50? Please.

To be honest, whatever her late conversion pans out to be, I think people like this are part of the problem and another reason why we are hated so much abroad. After having put 13 1/2 years of my life into political organizing, I ran into this sort of attitude over and over again and I see it as realy pathetic. One might argue that she is waking up, I suppose. My question: is it too late?