ARE there voters in your family who aren’t voting tomorrow? What do you make of their stance? Voting has always seemed to be a desirable norm, both a privilege and a small price to pay for being an adult citizen. I have voted in every election since 1992, even if Election Days counted among the longest and most challenging workdays I kept as a full-time journalist. Now, I can understand how more important work might keep some (for example, emergency room doctors and nurses) from voting, but I don’t know why adults who might otherwise have the time and qualifications to vote, choose not to do so.
Someone in my family posted recently that he doesn’t discriminate and that he hates all politicians equally. This, I suppose, is his explanation for why he doesn’t intend to vote tomorrow, or why he has decided to absent himself from recent elections. This is not a novel position.
Politics has long been “the systematic organization of hatreds.” The American historian and novelist Henry Brooks Adams wrote this in a self-published book in 1906, made available online by Project Gutenberg Australia. Adams, who hailed from a family that produced two American presidents, was referring to Massachusetts politics, which he described as being “as harsh as the climate.” He saw, in “a cold that froze the blood, and a heat that boiled it,” how the extremes of weather could stand for “perplexing, warring, irreconcilable problems.” But I couldn’t find anything in the records that showed whether or not he voted diligently.
I think, though, that professing to hate all politicians and deciding not to vote is, for lack of a more polite term, a cop-out. It is a way to avoid the difficult but necessary work of keeping an eye on all public leaders, regardless of how we may feel about them as individuals.
Neat trick: it doubles as a way to avoid responsibility when things go wrong in our public life, as they sometimes will. So the domestic economy is growing at its most sluggish rate in nearly four years? Blame the legislators who sat on the annual budget or supported inflationary policies. Not having voted at all, some of our fellow citizens can easily shift the blame. Perhaps someone should point out that such a convenient position doesn’t shield them from the effects of poor legislative or executive decisions.
Before any of us starts blaming indifference among the young, we should know that the data do not support that assumption. (Also, blaming millennials is lazy and ill-informed.) What we do know is that voter turnout improved nationwide from 2010 to 2016, from 75 percent to 81.9 percent. Still, some 11 million registered voters chose to sit the 2016 elections out. What could have been more important? What else kept 409,695 registered voters in Cebu so busy on a non-working holiday that they decided not to vote in the presidential and local elections of 2016?
Unless you have an actual life to save tomorrow, you must vote. It is that simple. The laundry can wait and so can your social media accounts. If you end up missing Episode 5 of the final season of Game of Thrones, stay up for the replay tomorrow night. You say you’re dreading the heat? Bring a cardboard fan and a bottle of water, place a Good Morning towel between your back and your most comfortable shirt and make sure you drink your hypertension meds before you head for the polling precincts. But go out and vote.
“Freedom and equality are self-justifying values,” Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt wrote in 2018. “But they are not self-executing.” Our quality of life depends on it: you really must vote.