#this moral high ground looks an awful lot like rugged individualism with a rebrand

[mayra-quijotescx]

I'm not going to run around lecturing people who were never going to vote regardless, and I'm sure as hell not going to criticize people who have already been summarily abandoned by both parties, but I think the 'I'm not going to vote because maybe we deserve to suffer' attitude specifically that I've seen some people express comes from the same place as 'I'm not going to take any COVID precautions because I personally accept the risk of getting it again'.

For the top-of-ticket voting, neither option is great, but one will be objectively much worse for the majority of those not already equally fucked over by both parties. Maybe the people making the 'we deserve to suffer' argument can find some kind of secular Calvinist virtue in opting into suffering because of how our government makes others suffer, but children and teenagers forced to carry a baby to term didn't agree to that. People forced to live as second-class citizens because of a bullshit felony on their records didn't agree to that. None of the people living in other countries who are still negatively affected by US policies agreed to that, your increased suffering as a US citizen in the US doesn't actually do anything for them, and it's profoundly self-possessed and insulting to them to think it would. Sitting out an action in the explicit hopes of your community's conditions deteriorating because another community is suffering is, at best, a warped and unhelpful interpretation of solidarity, if not its opposite. (I've even seen some people sincerely arguing that things need to get worse so The People(TM) will rise up and throw off their chains in The Revolution(TM), and I don't know how to tell people who don't even talk to their neighbors that an increase in ambient suffering is not an adequate substitute for political education and organizing.)

Just like with COVID: a lot of people have personally accepted the risks of just getting sick all the time until they die untimely of complications, but the waiter who can't afford a single sick day didn't agree to that. The cashier whose boss will fire them if they wear a mask in an economy where it's nearly impossible to 'just get another job' didn't agree to that. And the people who previously accepted all risks and then wound up severely disabled or dead didn't realize until it was too late what exactly they were agreeing to, and I do genuinely hate that for them. I also don't know if a conversation on solidarity can be had with someone who thinks of others so little that they won't cover their face running errands or going out (at someone else's workplace) because 'well, I'm fine with it, if I die I die.'