My mother and I didn't vote in our state's primary. It wasn't an act of rebellion, it was an act of me forgetting what date the primary was and my mother forgetting there was even a primary at all. I was feeling guilty until I looked at who was winning, at which point I remembered something important; we live in a blue state. The democrats win most elections here. Which is fine, since both of us vote democrat, until you realize that means that your vote doesn't really matter in that case.
This isn't helped by the fact that I'm an anarchist. Mostly because I don't think society will ever be free from the upper classes unless we build a war where classes can't form. No candidate on that ballot represented my view points anyway.
My mother keeps saying the problem with our country is that the parties refuse to compromise, but that's not the issue I see. Compromise only works if both sides have an overarching goal they want to work toward. You give up a little of what you want so they can have what they want. It doesn't work if only one side has a goal, or if neither has a goal at all. The issue is that Republicans don't have a goal, they have an image of what congress should look like. The democrats no represent every issue people have with our country, so the party has to compromise with itself so that anything gets done at all. All the republicans have to do to stay in power is to make sure the democrats can't do anything, which is easy when they can't agree on what needs to get done in the first place.
Compounding this issue, even though the internet is the center of culture and society these days, our politicians don't talk about it's existence at all. They use it to campaign, but they don't willingly talk about how problems with Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram affect everyone, or how misinformation is hurting trust in everyone.
People say the problem is that we keep forming our own information bubbles, cutting off information that doesn't validate our existing viewpoints. I won't say that isn't a problem, but I think it's a little bit more nuanced then that. After all, we had social bubbles before social media, they just usually came in the form of neighborhoods and school/work campuses instead of fandoms. What people don't talk about was that the geography of a town tended to be homogenous, white people and black people lived apart from one another and non-straight people had to hide their lifestyle. Hitler, after all, rose to power prior to the rise of Facebook. Media was more restricted, but that meant that all opinions were filtered through the lens of broadcasters and publishers, who were usually old, white and male. Political parties were closer, but that was because the government didn't acknowledge a lot of peoples issues. The point I'm making is that while we seemed less divided, that didn't mean that things were better. Sometimes your uncle only seems to like children, after all.
What keeps dividing us isn't the issues themselves, it's that a lot of people don't want the world they know to disappear. I do understand that, none of us want to admit that the world we see isn't real. But we can't ignore the problems people are facing, and we should never have done so in the first place. Society will only ever be good for us if we build it in a way that everyone is able to believe in it effortlessly. We keep opting for the direct-to-DVD version of society, the kind where we write down a bunch of rules and tell people that they have to follow them regardless of how well the rules actually work for them. That only works for young children, and only because schools can kick people out. The moment a parent complains to the media, you can bet there'll be hell to pay.
What happens when our government decides it would be easier to kick the complainers out instead of working build a world we can live in safely and happily? We all know, and I think we can all agree that if we saw it coming we'd do everything to stop it. Well, it's coming. Book banning's, attacks on LGBTQIA+ people, Roe v. Wade being overturned and the direct promise of more from the supreme court. It's only a matter of time before they bring back concentration camps. Our country has a lot of blood on its hands, there were a lot of fascists in the thirties after all. How much more blood must be sacrificed to the alter of patriotism before we decide that enough is enough?
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