this post was submitted on 15 Feb 2025
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Better than not voting and doing nothing.
The best would be voting and being an activist.
You are free to participate in any kind of meaningless gestures and genuflection to make yourself feel better, but the US is a controlled authoritarian oligarchy with democratic window dressing and not a democracy in any meaningful way.
Look, if you aren't going to do anything else, you might as well vote. It's the best you can do. And even if you are active, you should still vote.
Right, I said you are free to do any meaningless gestures you want
My guy, life is filled with meaningless gestures we all have to regularly do.
I frequently know the only viable solution for companywide issues at my workplace. Do I just run off on my own and shove it through because I know I'm right? No.
Even when the change is so buried in the back end that they'd never know, I participate in the meaningless gesture of informing the business folks, taking questions that they don't have the knowledge base to understand my answers, etc. It's a regular process established in my workplace, and despite it not changing anything, it must be followed.
For the price of a few hours every four years, I get to bite back at people who argue that you don't have any say if you didn't vote. And if by some miracle voting ends up effecting some change (companies drawing conclusions from the popular vote maybe?), I'm already doing the bare minimum.
Wow, a lot of words to say nothing. You don't have to do anything meaningless, it is by definition meaningless.
You're right, if you alone can't fix everything, there's really no point to trying.
Worse would be discouraging voting and activism. Instead try to tell people that nothing they do matters and just bend over and take it up the ass
Malcom X said,
“ I don’t think that if I was cornered by any fox or a wolf, that I would have to take a choice between either one. I don’t see any choice between a fox or a wolf. A fox is a fox and a wolf is a wolf—to me. Neither one is the lesser of two evils. Both of them are evil. And Negroes, when they become politically mature, I think will realize that you don’t have to throw the bullets out of your gun just because you have a gun. Likewise you should wait until you have a target and bring that target down. I think when Negroes become really mature, they won’t vote just because they can vote. Sometimes they’ll abstain. Ofttimes in a position of abstaining is as effective in its results as an actual vote, as is proved in the UN. You have those who say “yes,” those who say “no,” and those who abstain. And those who abstain have just as much weight. And probably the most intelligent thing Negroes could do at this juncture would be to abstain and withhold their vote completely and make both the fox and the wolf fight it out among themselves.”
This was true when he said and is true now. Malcom X knows far more about opposition to reactionary politics than you do and he what he said was in no outdated then nor now.
(https://www.icit-digital.org/articles/malcolm-x-at-columbia-university-november-20-1963)