Oh fucking spare me this self righteous performance.
Do YOU actually give a fuck? I've been doing queer, anti-racist, anti-war activism on the streets for fucking 25 years. I have been arrested at protests, I have had the shit beaten out of me for being queer, more than once. What have you done lately, hmm? Please enlighten us all as to what exactly gives you the right to tell people who they are and what their experience has been. Please, I would SINCERELY love to hear it.
OBVIOUSLY the Dems have a shit ton of problems, we all know that. But expecting people to do the BARE ASS MINIMUM of voting to stop this disgusting backslide is not too much and people are right to be upset with folks that cannot be bothered.
And really, how fucking dare you accuse people that have dedicated large parts of their lives to progressive change of not giving a fuck, seriously, how fucking vile.
I regularly protest police encroachment and gentrification projects. I've protested drone warfare. I've also been threatened with arrest, in and outside
of organized demonstration. I am part of an active Black mutual aid organization now. And I've given way too much fucking money and phone banked for the fucking Democrats, even
after I've determined that I just don't like them that much. So I've both been on the streets and I've helped on the campaign trail. All you have on me is years of experience because you're older, but you don't get to posture as if I haven't done shit either.
Regardless, my specific problem with you, and others who constantly complain about non-voters, is that you refuse to engage with subsects of the population who don't vote specifically because the system has failed them,
not because they're just entitled brats who didn't get their unicorn candidate. We all that know that a subsect of the population just
doesn't vote. So the two questions we're left with are "How do we engage at least some of these people so they are primed and willing to vote?" and "How do we make sure they vote for
our people?" We don't get to answering these questions with bitching about the fact that these people don't vote, or putting everyone who has failed to vote for one reason or another in this singular box of assholes who are too privileged or evil to bother.
This attitude also doesn't address the fact that the backsliding has been happening despite increasing national and even mid-terms turnout, and despite the fact that Democrats more often than not win the national popular vote.
Clearly, there are systemic issues that are here that are not perfectly ameliorated even if you were to get 100% turnout, because we can outvote the competition and still lose anyway. Ultimately, we need to reconfigure the messaging and smartly engage with different demographics of non-voters, because if 30% of the population just regularly does
not vote, and that has been the reality cycle after cycle, bitching about them obviously isn't going to do anything this time, nor is it going to do anything if Obergefell is about to go next. The straight middle-class white dudes who don't vote because they're subconsciously aware that none of this will affect their personal life is one thing, and arguably not even people worth pursuing in the first place. But Black and Brown folks who are disenchanted with the system because even their own candidates have failed them
are still reachable, and thus they are worth our time. So that's what we should put our focus on.
And finally, I will say I am sorry for misjudging you. I took out my frustrations with this subject on you when it wasn't necessary.