Wednesday, November 03, 2004
Beth says it beautifully: "As a well-established, middle-class, educated liberal, I do most of my voting based on issues that will never affect me personally. I am too old and too female to worry about a draft. I don’t have kids of my own so education issues do not affect me directly. I have health care; I have reasonably solid retirement investments. I have a job. I can pay for my own schooling, and so can Jeremy.
"He is also too old to draft; he can pay for his education; he has good and solid retirement investments. I am almost too old to ever need an abortion, and I am probably too old to ever want one. If I really needed or wanted one, I could probably get one even if they were suddenly outlawed in California. Jeremy and I are far too old to suddenly embark on a life of crime, so criminal justice issues don’t really affect us. (In fact, the darker things get in that realm, the better my job prospects.) We aren’t gay, we worry about privacy issues in the abstract but really aren’t the kind of people who need to worry about a knock on the door in the dead of the night. Absent some giant administrative fuck-up somewhere, neither of us is ever going to be in a position to say, “You got a warrant, officer?”
The issue that affects us the most on a personal level is taxes, and we keep voting to raise those. Futilely, as it turns out; our state and our country just spiral deeper and deeper into debt, and they don’t want our money.
So when we vote, we are voting for other people. We vote for the poor, we vote for the incarcerated, we vote for the mentally ill, we vote for the disenfranchised. And we vote for the young."
Beth is angry that the people that we both believed we were trying to help by voting for Kerry didn't turn out (read the whole thing-- like everything she says it is smack on). I'm mad about it, too, but I wasn't voting for a generic class of person-- I was voting for my three daughters, and it breaks my heart that they are going to live in a country like what this country is becoming.
"He is also too old to draft; he can pay for his education; he has good and solid retirement investments. I am almost too old to ever need an abortion, and I am probably too old to ever want one. If I really needed or wanted one, I could probably get one even if they were suddenly outlawed in California. Jeremy and I are far too old to suddenly embark on a life of crime, so criminal justice issues don’t really affect us. (In fact, the darker things get in that realm, the better my job prospects.) We aren’t gay, we worry about privacy issues in the abstract but really aren’t the kind of people who need to worry about a knock on the door in the dead of the night. Absent some giant administrative fuck-up somewhere, neither of us is ever going to be in a position to say, “You got a warrant, officer?”
The issue that affects us the most on a personal level is taxes, and we keep voting to raise those. Futilely, as it turns out; our state and our country just spiral deeper and deeper into debt, and they don’t want our money.
So when we vote, we are voting for other people. We vote for the poor, we vote for the incarcerated, we vote for the mentally ill, we vote for the disenfranchised. And we vote for the young."
Beth is angry that the people that we both believed we were trying to help by voting for Kerry didn't turn out (read the whole thing-- like everything she says it is smack on). I'm mad about it, too, but I wasn't voting for a generic class of person-- I was voting for my three daughters, and it breaks my heart that they are going to live in a country like what this country is becoming.
// posted by Bill @ 3:24 PM 
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