David Foster Wallace on Voting

Bracketing aside for now whether you were maybe gladdened or saddened by last night's Midterm election results, the record-low voter participation indicates that the majority of Americans were pretty indifferent towards the whole ordeal.  On the one hand, it's hard to fault the apathetic: amidst the relentless barrage of hateful political-ads rife with inaccuracies, ad hominum attacks and other assorted logical fallacies, amidst all the long-broken campaign promises and the candidates sold to the highest bidder, amidst all the compromised principles--or worse, toxic uncompromising petulance--it is of course all too easy to become cynical, pessimistic, depressed, despairing, and ultimately apathetic, as a defense mechanism against the whole sordid shebang. 

But on the other hand, that's exactly how the powerful want you to respond.  I quote someone far more articulate than I, the inimitable David Foster Wallace (post-modern novelist extraordinaire), who, clear back during Election 2000, wrote the following for Rolling Stone:

"If you are bored and disgusted by politics and don't bother to vote, you are in effect voting for the entrenched Establishments of the two major parties, who please rest assured are not dumb, and who are keenly aware that it is in their interests to keep you disgusted and bored and cynical and to give you every possible reason to stay at home doing one-hitters and watching MTV on primary day. By all means stay home if you want, but don't bullshit yourself that you're not voting. In reality, there is no such thing as not voting: you either vote by voting, or you vote by staying home and tacitly doubling the value of some Diehard's vote." -DFW

 There really is no such thing as not voting.  For the party faithful will always vote, you see--and all that's diluting their votes right now is the rest of us.  That's why they run hateful attack ads, specifically to turn you off, so that only their votes count each election by default!  Now, maybe some elections we really are just voting for the lesser of two evils--but don't for a second assume that that difference in degree does not matter.  

For what would happen if we all exercised our rights to vote?  I'm not sure we've ever actually ran that experiment.  That alone could be revolutionary.

 Which reminds me: Happy Guy Fawkes Day.  Remember remember the 5th of November...