#and have at least a SLIGHT inkling of how much harder a trump presidency will make it

[caffeineandsociety]

The problem is way too many people either think - or know better, but want you to think - that the Venn diagram of shitty policy is like this-

When in fact it's like this-

Full overlap. It's not "American deaths OR non-American deaths, pick one", it's "so, you're watching and sharing control of a bus that's hurtling over a cliff, you have 5 minutes to choose - will it be better to crash it into a busy campground? Or through a hospital that will collapse ONTO the campground, a busy shopping center, a load-bearing pillar holding up a huge chunk of the densely populated city you live in, then finally an oil refinery, which will explode and run off into the water supply and pollute the planet for decades to come? There are allegedly third options, but none of them are actually viable if you're being even remotely honest with yourself, and there are a LOT of people who really want to do the latter for some reason already tugging on the wheel."

This is what we mean when we say that voting is damage control. It is not the be-all and end-all. It is to societal improvement as breathing is to staying alive - FAR from all you need, but one of the fastest ways to fuck yourself if you stop doing it, or worse, lose the power to do so. Which is a risk this cycle! Voter disenfranchisement is a big deal battleground tool of the far right! I'm always hearing cynical takes about how "if voting worked they'd make it illegal", but the counterpoint to that - if voting DIDN'T work, they wouldn't be trying to do exactly that; why else would 2023 have seen a near record number of voter restrictions proposed and enacted? Hell, why would January 6 have happened?

I want everyone who SERIOUSLY thinks "oh, we SHOULDN'T vote because BOTH parties are bad, and anyone who says otherwise doesn't care how many people die as long as they get theirs" to ask themself, as seriously as possible - how likely do you think it is that we'll have a functioning alternative system in, at the time of this writing, 9 months? What are you doing to achieve that goal? What will you do if Trump gets reelected and ramps up police activity to make even your keyboard activism enforceably illegal? Your entire existence? Because that's a big part of what they're trying to do! Do you realize that the system doesn't void the results if turnout is too low? That a significant contingent of right-wingers religiously - literally - vote for ANYONE running with an R on the ticket? Do you think abstaining - and thereby allowing that contingent to go uncontested - will save a SINGLE non-American life?

It won't.

Voting against that won't save the world, no, just like breathing won't save you if you decide to never eat or drink or move from your bed again, but if you DON'T do it, then be honest with yourself - you're fucked no matter what else you do or don't do.

Voting is to buy time so we CAN dismantle the system and rebuild it better, because one side wants to kill us all preemptively to fortify it.