If you really want to change things, vote!
I plan to be in Washington on the 24th with the kids from Parkland, Florida, attending the March against gun violence in this country. I will be taking my daughter. It is about time a majority of Americans stood up against the NRA, and the great number of politicians in this country who bow before them in this senseless love of guns and the money they produce for the arms industry.
I start with the march because it is important that I don’t downplay all forms of peaceful protest like letters to the editor in your local newspapers, caravans of cars keeping a certain issue alive in your city, even my occasional words written in Progreso Weekly. But the fact is that the most important form of expression we can ALL exercise in this country to make the changes needed is the VOTE.
It is why I shall share with you an outstanding editorial that appears The New York Times. I offer you a number of paragraphs that should convince you that voting matters and that we should look forward to upcoming elections — so that we may change the world.
The editorial explains that “In the end, the biggest obstacle to more Americans voting is their own sense of powerlessness. It’s true: Voting is a profound act of faith, a belief that even if your voice can’t change policy on its own, it makes a difference. Consider the attitude of Andrea Anthony, the Wisconsin woman who was deterred by the state’s harsh new voter-ID law after voting her whole adult life. “Voting is important to me because I know I have a little, teeny, tiny voice, but that is a way for it to be heard,” Ms. Anthony said. “Even though it’s one vote, I feel it needs to count.”
“She’s right. The future of America is in your hands. More people voting would not only mean “different political parties with different platforms and different candidates,” the writer Rebecca Solnit said. “It would change the story. It would change who gets to tell the story.”
What follows, then, are just a few more paragraphs of words so important that I felt they must be shared. The New York Times concludes that “There are a lot of stories desperately needing to be told right now, but they won’t be as long as millions of Americans continue to sit out elections. Lament the state of the nation as much as you want. Then get out and vote.”
The title tells it all:
VOTE. THAT’S JUST WHAT THEY DON’T WANT YOU TO DO.
“This is a fragile moment for the nation. The integrity of democratic institutions is under assault from without and within, and basic standards of honesty and decency in public life are corroding. If you are horrified at what is happening in Washington and in many states, you can march in the streets, you can go to town halls and demand more from your representatives, you can share the latest outrageous news on your social media feed — all worthwhile activities. But none of it matters if you don’t go out and vote.
“It’s a perennial conundrum for the world’s oldest democracy: Why do so many Americans fail to go to the polls? Some abstainers think that they’re registering a protest against the awful choices. They’re fooling themselves. Nonvoters aren’t protesting anything; they’re just putting their lives and futures in the hands of the people who probably don’t want them to vote. We’ve seen recently what can happen when people choose instead to take their protest to the ballot box. We saw it in Virginia in November. We saw it, to our astonishment, in Alabama in December. We may see it this week in western Pennsylvania. Voting matters.
“Casting a ballot is the best opportunity most of us will ever get to have a say in who will represent us, what issues they will address and how they will spend our money. The right to vote is so basic, President Lyndon Johnson said in 1965, that without it “all others are meaningless.”
“And yet every election, tens of millions of Americans stay home. Studies of turnout among developed nations consistently rank the United States near the bottom. In the most recent midterms, in 2014, less than 37 percent of eligible voters went to the polls — the lowest turnout in more than 70 years. In 2016, 102 million people didn’t vote, far more than voted for any single candidate.”
