Why I Still Don't Vote

Four years ago, I made a good number of people unhappy with my allegiance to the notion that the two parties are so similar that they should just be one, and that voting third party is stupid too, and - to be just plain blunt about it - there's nothing politically, morally, or ethically good or proper or right about continuing to prop up a corrupt, outmoded, and dying political structure like the American one.

I still believe all those things, even if I do think that the people around President Dubya are a bunch of dangerous ninnies.

And so, I've taken even more flak this year for refusing to vote. I refuse even to register in the state and county I live in. Yes, I know what this means. This is not uninformed apathy, which is second only to misinformed action in my book of annoyances (but, more on that later, perhaps as a separate essay).

I do not feel that this country deserves my vote. America, like all the other modern behemoths, has grown too large to effectively be managed using old methods. We've seen large corporations ground to dust in the last four years because there was no way for them to manage themselves effectively, thereby allowing criminals to subvert the already corrupt way that they function to reach all new levels so shocking that even a Republican White House had to step in and have Justice file charges.

America has also become the complete realization, to my mind, of a Lost Ideal. What is taught in our Civics and History classes as children might as well be fairy tales. Democracy? Hardly. Liberty and freedom? Not in the last hundred years. Common defense? It's hard to mount a common defense when your standing army is spread out all over the world, defending little more than corporate land holdings and outdated political boundaries.

This is all fairly non-specific, but it forms a sort of core feeling that I have about not voting. In specific, for this election cycle of 2004, I feel that voting will not only perpetuate a corrupt system but will also go a long way to continuing a bloody war. Regardless of outcome, neither Bush nor Kerry has made any statement to lead me to believe that they have anything on their minds other than drawing out the death in the Middle East and beyond (Kerry has gone on record now to double Special Forces in Afghanistan and has committed to "killing" terrorists - not capturing, trying and punishing them, killing them). This has the net effect of putting "America" - as it were - at even greater risk of "terrorist attack" (what was once called "freedom fighting" when it was against Communists in Latin America or Afghanistan, twenty years ago).

Add to this a Democratic candidate (laughably called "liberal") who voted to support an illegitimate war (don't feed me the party line about what he voted to support, he voted for war. Period. A member of the intelligence committee should be held at a higher standard, I think), who voted to (and wrote parts of) the attack on rights that is the USA PATRIOT Act, and who has not yet said (to my knowledge) one word about repealing it. A candidate whose idea of progressive wages would be raising the minimum wage to $7 an hour, by 2007, gee thanks, and whose idea of taxes includes increasing taxes on Americans who make $200,000 a year. Here's an idea, John, why not take a nickel for every bottle of ketchup your wife sells and start a fund to take care of the old and the sick? After that, start looking at other corporations, who make far more than the handful of executives and management types that fall into that mythical (and again, outdated) tax bracket.

But, we cannot do that in this country, no. America is no longer a party with a progressive left wing and a status-quo driven right wing. We are now a nation of a weak, inept, and thoroughly un-American Party of the Ruling Class.

I want no part of it. I want my hands clean.