#honestly this is the website that kept going on about the 10 megacorporations doing most of the climate change

[wild-at-mind]

You cannot absolve yourself from the fact of your existence in a country that has done horrible things in the past and present by failing to vote. Sorry.

Should you need to absolve your own existence? Some people talk as if you do, but personally I passionately do not think so. Guilt and actions caused by it do not create good activism. The person who convinces themselves that voting is the same as committing war crimes themselves will have a lot of difficulty with basically anything they apply that standard to. That's the problem with society- you can't opt out, not really. Not even with the hyper-anarchist existence I was trying to describe recently. Everything we do, if through enough degrees of separation, harms someone. Anything we need to survive in this world- clothes, food, electronics. We know this. We have to live with this, and not succomb to the type of thinking that most closely resembles OCD with morality fixation. When I see people behaving like this, it blows my mind, like I spent so long trying to unlearn these thought patterns and you're doing it to yourselves?!!

Society is currently set up so that we have to harm people all the time, from living in countries that sanction wars in other countries to damaging the planet. We have to live with that in the here and now, and do what we can when we can. Of course we can ask for better, but I firmly believe the only way to work towards better is to work within society and make connections to others rather than driving them away with this absolutist guilting and hostility to each other. Do not take on a burden of guilt that the person you passed on the street doesn't have. We cannot make society better if we are constantly stumbling under the burden of guilt.

Signed- an OCDer and eco activist